Several Hearts players still waiting for wages

SEVERAL Hearts players have still not received their overdue wages from last week, the Evening News can reveal.

Certain members of the squad, understood to include Andy Driver, Bruno Aguiar and Christos Karipidis, were not paid on Monday when the club processed outstanding monies for their players.

As of this morning, the individuals concerned were yet to receive their salaries. They were asked to be patient about the issue during a meeting with senior Hearts officials yesterday, however, no date has been given regarding when wages will arrive.

A Tynecastle source said: "It seems not everyone got their money on Monday and there was a meeting about it."

With this week's salaries due to drop into players' accounts tomorrow, players have been left fearing a repeat scenario of last week's delay.

Wages initially failed to arrive last Friday with the club and officials at Vladimir Romanov's Ukio Bankas Investment Group, Hearts' parent company, stating it was simply a time delay and that payments would go through on Monday.

It has emerged that, while many players did receive funds at the start of the week, some did not.

Furthermore, Arbroath are ready to intensify their attempts to recoup a sell-on fee from Hearts for Andy Webster.

The Gayfield club agreed to accept £14,437 plus VAT from the £150,000 Wigan paid Hearts for Webster following a ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport in January this year. However, that debt is still outstanding.

John Christison, the Arbroath chairman, said today: "We had a board meeting on Tuesday night and we discussed a number of things we could do to try and get the money," confirmed Christison.

"We are in touch with the SFA over this but one thing we could do is to ask to freeze their gate receipts and we could also look at applying a signing ban.

"We have been too nice about this for too long and it's sad it has come to this."