NEIL Lennon is being chased for legal costs after losing more than £100,000 in a tax scheme and failing to get his cash back.
Experts say the Celtic manager and his fellow investors could face a bill of up to £20million after a judge threw out their lawsuit.
And the group going after the money include lawyers Collyer Bristow, who advised Craig Whyte on his disastrous takeover of Rangers.
Lennon put £200,000 into two investment schemes in 2003, when he was earning £30,000 a week at Celtic.
He was told they would save him almost £500,000 in income tax.
Celtic striker John Hartson, England goalkeeper Paul Robinson and English rugby stars Joe Worsley and Jason Leonard also invested cash.
But they all lost out after the Inland Revenue said the schemes were against tax rules.
Lennon only got back £80,000 of his money – and received none of the tax benefits he was promised.
The schemes’ architect, disgraced Danish entrepreneur Bjorn Stiedl, was jailed for an unrelated pension fraud in 2004.
Lennon and more than 500 other investors teamed up to sue the company behind the schemes, Innovator One. Stiedl was the driving force behind the firm.
But they all lost out after the Inland Revenue said the schemes were against tax rules.
The highly complex investment plans were designed to exploit tax breaks for investors who put their money into software and technology.
The incentives were brought in after the dotcom crash hit technology shares on global stock markets in 2000.
Lennon put a total of £200,000 into two schemes – one called Mamjam Technology Platform Partnership and another called Casedirector Technology Partnership.
Investors put in a little more than £6million.
The schemes then took out another £19million in bank loans and used the cash to buy software from another company.
The idea was that Lennon would be able to count £800,000 of the borrowed money as part of his investment, giving him a total of £1million and allowing him to reduce his income tax bill by £400,000.
But the company who sold the software to the schemes then put the borrowed money on deposit with the bank, meaning it had effectively gone round in a circle.
And the taxman ruled that, because of that, the investors could only claim tax breaks on the money they had put in themselves.
That meant Lennon would only have got back up to £80,000.
And since the investment scheme failed, the rest of his stake was wiped out, saddling him with a £120,000 loss.
Hartson invested £120,000 in the same two schemes as his former teammate. He joined Lennon and the other investors in the lawsuit against Innovator One.
They claimed at the High Court in London that the schemes were fraudulent and had been badly put together.
In all, they alleged, their investments had been mis-sold for more than a dozen different reasons.
But judge Mr Justice Hamblen rejected their case.
He ruled: “Although the claimants were understandably aggrieved to lose their cash contributions and receive back only limited tax relief, there are obvious risks in going into aggressive tax schemes which offer the prospect of almost immediately doubling your money.”
Collyer Bristow were one of the defendants in the lawsuit after acting as lawyers for Innovator One, and are now preparing to try to claim back their costs from the investors.
A costs hearing is expected later in the year. No date has been set.
If the bill does reach £20million, it will leave the 555 investors facing costs of £36,000 each. Lennon and Hartson declined to comment.
The Innovator One schemes were similar to more recent schemes involving film financing which have also proved popular among footballers because of promises to massively lower their income tax bills. But the film schemes have often proved similarly unsuccessful, with the taxman refusing to hand over rebates.
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