BY INCLUDING the sale of Jean-Alain Boumsong from Rangers to Newcastle among 17 transfers he considered suspicious, Lord Stevens belatedly joined the end of a long queue of people who took in the Frenchman's absurdly short Ibrox career and smelled a rat.

The Boumsong episode always seemed dubious. Having been heavily touted for a move from Auxerre to Liverpool, the French international - a prestigious talent available on a free transfer in the summer of 2004 - landed in the SPL instead of the Premiership. Rangers were entitled to crow about this apparently remarkable coup, but within weeks word began to circulate that all might not be as straightforward as it seemed.

Boumsong had barely crossed the threshold at Ibrox before he was being linked with a move to Newcastle. The story grew arms and legs, to the point that his quick escape became inevitable.

Even before the January 2005 transfer window, the player's agent, Willie McKay - another who is in Lord Stevens' sights - was in the papers telling how upset Boumsong and his girlfriend had been when someone shouted at them to "f*** off to Newcastle" in a hospitality area of Ibrox.

When the transfer window opened, Rangers duly accepted an £8 million bid and Boumsong was gone after just 28 appearances.

This is what is known in football as "parking", in that it suits a player to be conveniently parked at one club while the one where he really expects to end up bides its time to make a move.

There are a few winners from this kind of manoeuvre. In Boumsong's case Rangers generated a sizeable profit while the player himself and McKay would have felt entitled to a slice of the cake from two major transfers in the space of six months.

Being used as a stop-off for Premiership-bound players may have been demeaning for Rangers. But other than the supporters who bought shirts and paid for Boumsong's name on the back there were no real losers at Ibrox.

Rangers chairman Sir David Murray will look anyone in the eye and maintain it was an excellent piece of wheeling and dealing. Murray and his former manager, Graeme Souness, were naturally involved in the deal to sell Boumsong to Newcastle but football deals have been done between friends since the dawn of time.

However, the question everyone was asking at the time was: did the entire £8m fee go to Rangers or did the player agree to come to Ibrox for a percentage of any future transfer fee? The club's 2005 accounts refer to £8.3m profit from player sales that year, and state that in the main those were from the transfer of Boumsong.

As far as Lord Stevens was concerned Rangers are in the clear. His 17-month investigation into bungs found no evidence of irregular payments by or to clubs officials involved in the Boumsong deal at Rangers or Newcastle.

But Stevens would not be the only man mystified about why Newcastle would feel it necessary to pay £8m for a player who had moved for nothing just five months earlier, and for whom no other club was bidding. How on earth did Souness sell that one to his board?

Murray may yet have the police turning up at his door to ask questions about his old pal. Lord Stevens did not like what he heard from Souness and Kenneth Shepherd, son of Newcastle chairman Freddy, about their respective roles in the deals for Boumsong, Emre Belozoglu (from Inter Milan) and Amdy Faye (from Portsmouth).

There were "inconsistencies in evidence", said Stevens. In other words Souness's version of events on those three deals did not square with Shepherd's - who was acting in one of those vague, unspecified roles football people seem to adopt during big transfers - and that was enough to set an alarm bell ringing for the investigators.

Boumsong's was one of the 17 transfers that Lord Stevens' report would not clear and the findings will be passed on to The Football Association and to Fifa for further investigation.

More than that, the report will also land on the desks of the Serious Fraud Office and the City of London Police. Souness and Kenneth Shepherd will not be having the best of weekends while they wonder why so many football people are in the clear while a finger of suspicion points at them.

The same can be said of McKay. He is not implicated in the Boumsong matter but, two transfers he was involved with concerning Portsmouth have not been cleared by Lord Stevens and will face further investigation.

More mud was thrown at him with the reference to a racehorse which he registered in the name of Portsmouth manager, Harry Redknapp. Lord Stevens took a dim view of that and wanted inquiries to continue into the pair's "long-term personal association".

Enough dirty allegations have been levelled at managers and agents in the past for them to become practised in the art of making vociferous counter-claims against their accusers.

"This is all about the green-eyed monster of those jealous of successful football agents," said McKay in response to the report's findings on him.

It is nothing of the sort. Lord Stevens has been driven not by jealousy but by the terms of the original remit when he was commissioned by the Premier League. Not for nothing were his Quest team referred to as "forensic investigators" into corporate malpractice.

Another implicated agent, Barry Silkman, howled that if he was accused of wrongdoing he would "close down the FA, the Premier League and Quest. They will rue the day they were born."

Lord Stevens and Quest must have smiled at that reaction. With such a cool head and rich command of the language Silkman should have no trouble proving his innocence if required to do so by the FA, Fifa or the cops.

There was a lack of hard evidence of wrongdoing from Quest, but in the FA and police hands the investigations should now intensify and it was a significant step against alleged corruption that 17 transfers, 15 agents and two managers - three, if you include Redknapp and his nag - were thrown into the public domain on Friday.

Those in football with nothing to hide are on Lord Stevens' side. As a respectable agent said yesterday, there was smoke before and now we have confirmation of a fire.