PARRAMATTA chairman Steve Sharp has vowed the Eels will fight to prove they did not intentionally set out to deceive the NRL over the latest salary cap drama involving star recruit Anthony Watmough.
Sharp has moved to assure Eels fans the club is “100 per cent confident” it will not be stripped of four competition points before the start of the 2016 season, or be forced to dump players to meet their obligations.
Parramatta have spent up big for 2016 with the recruitment of Kieran Foran, Beau Scott, Michael Jennings, Michael Gordon and Clint Gutherson to put together the club’s best roster in years.
But with the Eels already in strife for salary cap breaches from 2014, it has now been revealed the NRL is looking into a third-party deal involving Watmough, and whether it was properly disclosed to the NRL.
It relates to a salary cap guideline that forbids any company involved in a commercial relationship with an NRL club to also serve as a third-party sponsor.
Watmough’s TPA with ScoreCube, a wholly owned subsidiary of BlackCitrus, is at the centre of the new investigation.
The Eels have employed BlackCitrus in the past — and still do — with the IT firm providing a range of *services.
Stephen Moss, director of BlackCitrus, told The Daily Telegraph: “Any agreements that BlackCitrus had with previous or past NRL players have been fully approved in advance by the NRL.”
However, the problem for the Eels is that while Moss and Watmough, via his agent George Mimis, openly declared their plan to provide third-party sponsorship with NRL salary cap auditor Jamie L’Oste Brown, to the point where it was overseen by a lawyer acting for BlackCitrus before being signed off on, the question is, did Parramatta officials do the same?
Sharp is adamant if the Eels made a mistake here, it was not deliberate.
“The reported third-party deal was a registered third-party deal with the NRL,” Sharp said. “There is some queries whether it meets the salary cap rules or not.
“If it doesn’t then we will put that money on our salary cap and move forward.
The TAB are monitoring the situation closely. While they are yet to suspend betting, with the Eels $15 to win the premiership, the TAB said they were aware of the NRL inquiry.
Sharp said the club continued to work through its governance review with the NRL and believe they are on target to meet their obligations before the start of the season.
“We have corrected a whole heap of governance issues that we identified ourselves that were wrong and we are going forward,” he said.
“We have no intentions of starting minus four. Let’s put it in perspective, the minus four points hangs around the governance review of a salary cap breach from 2014.
“We have been working with the NRL. There was a couple of points that we got stuck on around constitutional change. We are working through those and hopefully by February 29 we will get a clean bill of health.”
Asked if losing players was a concern, Sharp added: “We have no intention of losing players. Our position going into 2016 is healthy. We won’t breach. We have got our salary cap in a pretty good order now.”
