A high court judgment in which the current England assistant manager, Sammy Lee, was found to have knowingly given false evidence has been upheld by the court of appeal. Lee, when manager of Bolton Wanderers for a short period in 2007 having taken over from Sam Allardyce, was found to have lied about his club’s involvement in signing the midfield player Gavin McCann, who had been poached by the agents SEM.

The Football Association has never taken any action against anybody involved in the case, despite findings revealing that Bolton and SEM then backdated the contract for McCann, and that Lee and other witnesses gave false evidence. Following the upholding of the judgment’s findings on appeal, the FA declined to comment.

Tony McGill, the agent who had an agreement with McCann to represent the player, succeeded in September 2014 with his accusation that SEM, whose then chief executive was the well-known agent Jerome Anderson, had poached McCann at the last minute with the Bolton deal already agreed. Bolton paid SEM a £300,000 fee for doing “little or nothing,” the judgment stated. Lee and Frank McParland, Bolton’s then general manager, were found to have lied about two meetings they claimed had taken place with McCann in a restaurant in Liverpool, designed to show that they had discussed McCann with SEM earlier than they did.

Gareth Southgate backs Luke Shaw against José Mourinho’s injury jibe Read more

His honour Judge Waksman QC, in his 2014 judgment, said he did not accept that any such meetings took place and stated of Lee’s, Bolton’s and SEM’s evidence: “Their accounts do not stack up and are riddled with inconsistencies and different versions over time.”

In a later ruling on legal costs Waksman recorded that Lee’s and McParland’s evidence about the meetings was “unreliable” and “false”, saying: “The events attested to by the Bolton witnesses concerning these meetings simply did not happen. True, I did not use the word ‘dishonesty’ [in his first judgment] but plainly, if their evidence on the facts on this issue was false, they must have known it to be so.”

Waksman also found that Bolton, then chaired by the late Phil Gartside, an FA board member, backdated the contract signed by McCann, to make it look as if SEM had been involved earlier than they were. The judge found that Gartside’s evidence was also unreliable and said he “became visibly uncomfortable” under questioning about the contract, before finally admitting that he signed it at a later date than the one written on the contract.

Bolton and SEM presented their commercial relationship as if SEM had acted for the club and not McCann, who was said to have resented paying tax when an agent’s fee was paid on his behalf by a club. This practice, of stating that an agent was acting for a club and not a player, was known as “switching.” Bolton, though, did record the £300,000 fee paid to SEM as a benefit for McCann anyway, the court was told, because Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs were conducting “an increasing number of investigations” into football transfers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gavin McCann in action for Bolton in 2008. The agent Tony McGill had a deal for the midfielder to join Bolton in 2007, but the player was then poached by the agency SEM, who earned £300,000 from the deal for doing ‘little or nothing’, the appeal court judgment stated. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

Waksman found that when McCann called McGill to tell him SEM were going to do the deal with Bolton, McGill had said: “Don’t do this, Gavin, we have an agreement, what about that?” McCann had replied: “I am sorry, I feel shit”.

McGill complained first to the Football Association in 2007, even before McCann signed for Bolton, that SEM had poached McCann from him, in breach of an oral agreement they had made for McGill to represent the player, but the FA took no action and he began court proceedings. Despite Waksman’s findings of poaching, false evidence given by several senior football figures including Sammy Lee and the backdating of the contract, the FA still took no action in 2014. Waksman ruled that despite his findings about the conduct of the Bolton and SEM defendants, McGill could not in fact receive any damages, because he did not have a written agreement with McCann so could not prove he definitely would have ultimately concluded the Bolton deal for him.

McGill appealed, and two court of appeal judges have now ruled that in fact he was the victim of an “unlawful means conspiracy” and should be entitled to damages for having lost the opportunity to conclude the deal for McCann to sign for Bolton. That issue, of how much damages McGill is entitled to from SEM, has been referred back to Waksman to be decided.

The appeal court judges, Lord Justice Lloyd Jones and Mr Justice Henderson, upheld all the factual findings made by Waksman in his 2014 judgment, noting that although he did not grant McGill’s claim for damages: “The judge was very critical, however, of much of the evidence given by the defendants and their witnesses, and he concluded that they had fabricated some key events in a misguided attempt to improve their position.”

McGill, who has spent nine years fighting to prove his case, told the Guardian that he informed the FA in May 2007 just after McCann was poached away from him, and had always kept the governing body informed.

Football insiders claim world game is ‘endemically corrupt’ in player transfers Read more

“They now know Bolton submitted a false and backdated contract, that Sammy Lee and Frank McParland gave evidence in court the judge dismissed as untrue, but the FA have done nothing,” he said.

Lee, the former Liverpool and England midfielder, left Bolton in October 2007, then worked in senior coaching roles at Liverpool, back at Bolton and Southampton, before the FA appointed him to rejoin Allardyce, as the England team’s assistant manager, in July this year.

After Allardyce, after taking charge of just one game, left by mutual consent following the undercover sting by the Daily Telegraph last month, Lee has been retained, and is currently working with the squad preparing for the forthcoming matches against Scotland and Spain.

Asked if following the appeal the FA would now be taking action against Lee or any of the other defendants in the McGill case, a spokesperson said: “We understand there are still matters to be decided by the court and therefore it would not be appropriate to comment”.