Dear Mr Taxman, I feel compelled to pen this missive over your miserly treatment of York City.

The city of York is no stranger to the activities of highwaymen, but not even the exploits of Dick Turpin could have surpassed your grasping digits.

You have held the Minstermen to ransom, only you were armed with a battery of fiscal hardware loaded with smug disdain.

Cash-bare York City is a club in hock to the tax authorities, namely the Inland Screw-you, sorry Revenue, and the Customs and Extract all you can, sorry Excise, of around £160,000. Barely enough to cover the annual Civil Service allowance on Rich Tea biscuits, I would vouch.

Yet you, ensconced in your London sanctuary - no doubt replete with latt-machines, lap-tops and colour co-ordinated paper-clips - came so close to throttling a club, whose debts are minuscule in relative comparison to a litany of football clubs who have survived the trauma of financial dire straits.

It's not as if York City, via those paragons of patience the Supporters' Trust, had been unaccommodating. No-one was seeking to shelve any responsibility for debts incurred and as a taxpayer myself I'd be loathe to let anyone off the hook.

But paying as much as they could manage was an overriding concern for the Trust. And in a concerted effort to try to satisfy the club's creditors the Trust backed a Company Voluntary Arrangement by which people owed cash would barely get a penny. Some even agreed to waive what they were owed.

Yourselves were deemed 'preferential creditors' and, therefore, were entitled to a bigger slice as is your relentless wont.

More than the requisite 75 per cent of creditors agreed to the CVA principle, save for your good selves.

First, you knocked back an opening gambit of ten pence for every pound owed. Okay. But the offer was then upped not once but several times and still the curt retort was nay. That led to another fingernail-biting week before the creditors' meeting was reopened.

Indications then were, at last, a compromise had been reached. Pah. That failed to account for the legendary claw of the taxman. Rather than rubber-stamp the CVA, you asked for a further adjournment, baulking even at 50p in every £1.

Leicester City, a Premiership club barely a season ago, were granted a 10p in the pound rate, while Barnsley's new CVA deal realised 35p in the £1 for preferential creditors like yourselves.

The debts of those clubs were far higher than those of the Minstermen, yet they - and that effectively means the Bootham Crescent fans again - are having to pay back more.

It takes not a mathematical genius to work out what York City offered was half of what was due. Accepting such a figure would afford the lifeline the club were seeking to grab under the stewardship of the Trust, who have strained every sinew of their collective fibre to keep the Minstermen going. There still are other hurdles to clear. But yours was the most obstructive barrier and was only straddled today when it was agreed to pay £100,000 - 63p in the £1.

Well, now that you are about to get your mitts on your hundred grand's worth of Minstermen flesh, I hope you're satisfied.

I trust too the same vigour will be applied in processing those mega-companies who elude tax payments through those legal loopholes that only ever seem open to the filthy rich.

Yours TKO (Taxed, Kippered, Offended).

Updated: 10:28 Tuesday, March 25, 2003