The RFU chief’s handling of the second-division Championship and the wider game has been under fire since it emerged he pocketed a salary in excess of £1m in the union’s latest annual report despite widespread financial troubles across the sport.
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Read MoreBow’s broadside comes ahead of an RFU Special General Meeting (SGM) on 27 March which was called to seek Sweeney’s removal.
The SGM was called after the Rugby Football Referees Union (RFRU) organised a letter with 152 signatures of RFU members. The RFRU, the Championship clubs and like-minded members are now operating within a group titled the Whole Game Union.
Since then, the RFU chairman Tom Ilube has resigned, and been replaced in the interim by former World Rugby chair Sir Bill Beaumont. And the RFU has attempted to reassure the rank and file with a series of in-person and virtual roadshows over the last three weeks, featuring Sweeney, Beaumont and colleagues.
Sweeney passed the question to Beaumont, who said the chief executive’s employment is constitutionally in the remit of the RFU Board of Directors, not the member clubs. Bow reiterated that the point of his question was whether or not Sweeney would resign, but there was no reply.
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Read MoreSimon Halliday, who was until last summer the chairman of the clubs, with Bow as deputy chair, wrote to Ilube in November with a claim that the agreement over promotion and relegation trumpeted last June had been legally contingent on various terms being clarified, and that the Championship clubs had in the meantime been “been stalled, misled, misinformed”.
Bow wrote in his programme notes: “Mr Sweeney and his executive have indulged in platitudes and half-truths around the value of the clubs outside the Premiership, using phrases like ‘return on investment’ about which he knows next to nothing, or he would not have been forced to double the amount he paid the Premiership simply because they asked for it.
Bow concluded: “There is the need for an SGM so that the game can speak.”
Yet the report was notably critical of the limited extent to which most of the Council and the rest of the game were made aware of the terms of the LTIP, including an incorrect reference in one RFU annual report that linked the plan to the recompense of wage cuts taken during the pandemic.
The RFU said it would not comment on Bow’s claims.
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