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Brian Waldron, the Melbourne Storm CEO during the time they were found to be cheating the salary cap, has come clean on his involvement in the scandal that rocked the NRL in 2010.
Waldron, 51, said he takes full responsibility for what he did at the Melbourne Storm, and admitted that he had been part of the decision to deliberately shirk the cap rules.
The Storm were stripped of two premierships by the NRL, and were fined half a million dollers.
“I take full accountability for my role,” Waldron told SEN Radio.
“As the chief of the business the buck stops with me and right from the start I’m very remorseful and sorry for what happened.
“As CEO I ran an organisation that did some things that were wrong and outside the rules of the game and we pushed the boundaries.
“There were circumstances that led to that initially, but that is no excuse and you can’t make excuses for what we did.”
“I have to redeem myself to my family and publicly,” he said.
“I lost my job rightly so and I lost my career rightly so.
“Five years on I’d like to get some redemption and this is part of it.
“And hopefully teach some lessons to others, which is why I now talk publicly.”
Waldron did leave the door open for a return to sports administration, though admitted his name was tarnished.
“At 51 I’d be a far better administrator now.
“I was at Richmond, St Kilda and then the Storm and I thought at all those places, my ability to get really good people around me to do the things I couldn’t do well was my strength.
“I don’t think that changes and I’d like to think I’d be a better administrator now.
“I am high risk obviously in some people’s eyes, but hopefully this is the start of people understanding that he is not that bad a person because good people can take accountability for their actions.”
Waldron attempted to explain there were mitigating circumstances to the calls made at the club at the time.
“I think we felt we had no option and that was wrong,” he said.
“I think we felt it was what we needed to do to be successful and that was wrong, because we had a great culture with great people.
“We felt obligated because we made these commitments to these players and that was wrong too, because we should have been better and gone to those players to explain the situation.
“We justified our behaviour because we thought others were doing it and that was wrong because whether or not they were is irrelevant.
“And we did it because there was an expectation that we needed to do everything we could to be successful, which was wrong.”
“Don’t take this as an excuse because there are no excuses, but we ran a business that had a dual charter of trying to grow the game and build the Storm,” Waldron said.
“We wanted to be successful for ourselves and we wanted to be successful for the NRL. We were a flagship like the Sydney Swans in Sydney.
“We struck a deal with the NRL, I felt, that we would organise to have a game development fund through the ARL’s game development … and we’d get some money out of that to pay players to grow the game down here.
“We did some contracts with players to do that. At the end of the first year when we’d paid the players some of that money we got told by the salary cap auditor that we weren’t allowed to do that.”
It was at that point that Waldron said the situation “steamrolled” and he felt compelled to continue to honour previous commitments made to players rather than re-do contracts in a bid to stay under the cap.
“I think we felt we had no option and that was wrong,” he said.
“I think we felt that was what we needed to do to be successful and that was wrong because we had a great culture with great people.
“We felt obligated because we made some commitments to these players, but that was wrong too because we should have been better and been able to go to those players and explain the situation.
“We probably comforted ourselves and justified our behaviour because we thought others were doing it and that was wrong too. Whether or not they were is irrelevant.”
He also argued that the breaches weren’t as significant as reported by the NRL, and that the club didn’t keep two sets of books to deceive cap auditors.
“The levels that they said we breached the caps by were false,” he said.
“I know the truth, we breached the cap.
“But do we go through it 150 miles an hour or 75 miles an hour in a 60 zone?
“That is irrelevant to the fact we breached the cap, however we weren’t successful because we breached the cap.
“We were successful because we had an amazing culture run by great people and I’m not talking about myself but the rest of the business.”
“We weren’t that big an organisation — we didn’t run two sets of books,” he said.
“I wasn’t there the day a second set of books was supposedly found, but from my understanding there was never a second set of books found.
“What was apparently handed to the NRL auditor was certain contracts and arrangements with players that were different to what has lodged with the NRL.
“That is not unusual.”
Waldron said he spoke to a senior figure at the Storm before the penalties were handed down.
“He told me ‘We’re going in tomorrow to tell that we’re over the cap in 2009 and we’ll take our medicine.’” he said.
“The next day they basically went in with their pants down and you can debate whether that was the right thing to do.
“History judges that it wasn’t (because) after the penalties were handed down, they tried to retrospectively challenge the NRL and say it wasn’t a due process, which is proven if you look at any legal advice.”
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