[TheMog]

Personally, unless you're paid well enough to be a very comfortable sacrificial lamb in this situation, I would walk away from it. This has "fall guy" written all over it.

If hierarchy is important in that culture and you're not introduced as the new boss, you're pretty much dead in the water from day one.

As other posters have said, until you figure out why the project is late (bad project management, unrealistic deadlines from the start, not the right people, trying to hit a moving target), going in an prescribing a cure without understanding the nature of the problem isn't going to get you anywhere.