I'm more confused about the "inflated sponsorship" claim, off the back of an alleged related party payment to Etihad.
I had originally thought that the angle they were coming from was that a related party provided payments via Etihad and that should have been disclosed. So the breech was that of deception.
It looks like they want to claim that Etihad should now be deemed a related party source, off the back of a one off payment, when Etihad were taking losses(the reasons they needed help are well documented), that City assure did not come from a related party source anyway. That all seems like shaky ground from UEFA.
That's the only way the 2012-2016 claim makes sense to me because there was nothing in the email leaks beyond the 2012-13 period, where this whole case rests. There are obvious flaws in this reasoning, even to your average Joe like me who doesn't claim to be a legal or finance expert. I'd be interested to hear
@Prestwich_Blue's take on this.
For a start, as I alluded to above, a one off payment, even if it was from Sheikh Mansour and they can prove it(which City have challenged from the start). Surely that can't be enough to prove beyond the question of doubt, that Etihad always was and still are a related party source?
Secondly, I didn't think Fair Market Value had anything to do with what a sponsor can afford. I thought it's what the club is worth to none related party sponsors. So how does the fact that Etihad could only pay £8m one season affect right up until 2016? Why even stop at 2016 if they are going to be as bold as that? Are they saying, only then were we worth what we are getting on the Etihad deal? How is it then, that if I remember right, that their own auditors said different back in, what was it, 2014?
Good question. We don't really know what UEFA means by this but we know from Der Spiegel that they looked at all the Abu Dhabi sponsorships as part of their original investigation. The concept of applying the market or fair value test only applies if the sponsor is deemed to be a 'related party'. If not, they can pay whatever they want. So if John Wardle had been both chairman of JD Sports and City at the same time, any sponsorship from them would have to be at market value. However Sports Direct, assuming Ashley had not other rleationship with the club, could sponsor our shirts for whatever we agreed, even if that was double or treble what JD Sports had paid. No market value test is applied to non-related parties.
UEFA claimed these companies were 'related parties' but that the Etihad deal would be deemed fair value. However it said that other Abu Dhabi deals weren't. We contested that but it was never tested in court and we voluntarily agreed not to increase those. I think Aabar was ultimately owned by a company chaired by Sheikh Mansour, although that's not enough in itself to prove conclusively that Aabar is definitely a related party. So even if we fully accpeted what UEFA had said (which we didn't) we'd have had to reduce two lesser sponsorships by about £10m or thereabouts, which would have made little impact in the overall scheme of things and certainly wouldn't have led to any further punishment than we actually received.
But I assume at the time UEFA weren't aware that Etihad and the other companies weren't paying the full amount of those sponsorships (although they should have known as that information about Etihad was already in the public domain as part of the Open Skies case in the USA courts). What they seem to punishing us for now is that we used those sponsorships to funnel ADUG money into the club. But if it's not a related party, as we claimed, then that's outside the FFP rules if that's the case. But it entirely depends on who paid the money. If it was the Executive Council, as as the case in the document filed in the New York courts, then that's a completely different matter to the money coming directly from ADUG. There's an email between Simon Pearce & Ferran Soriano where soriano asks Pearce to ask someone called Muhamad (not HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed as they'd never refer to him in that way) to split the remittances into those from Etihad and the other sponsors (which are revenue) from those coming directly from ADUG as equity investment. We don't know exactly who Muhamad is but I'm assuming he's someone in finance at ADUG.
You could read this two ways. One one hand, it's very sensible and allows us to show the monies from sponsors as separate amounts from the monies for, say the CFA build or to cover transfers. Etiahd and the other parties could have sent the money to ADUG, even if some of that was sourced from ADEC (the Executive Council). On the other hand, it could be interpreted as showing that ADUG just paid us a flat remittance that incorporated all the income we needed and got whatever was due from Etihad (£8m out of the full sponsorship, whatever that was, £40m or £50m).
Der Spiegel never published anything that conclusively proved that latter scenario though although it was clear Etiahd wasn't paying the full sponsorhip out of its own pocket. There were references to 'His Highness' which was taken by Der Spiegel and other jounralists to mean Sheikh Mansour but that wasn't correct. As I said, 'HH' without qualification would be Mohammed bin Zayed and there's absolutely no way someone like someone like Simon Pearce would get something like that wrong or allow someone else to. I'm told by someone who should know that it's even quite a serious breach of protocol. This is quite important as it shows that MBZ, rather than ADUG/Sheikh Mansour, was arranging the money.
In summary, if Etihad is deemed a related party by UEFA but also that the sponsorship represents market value, then there should be no issue, regardless of how the money was sourced. Even if the other companies were deemed related parties and their sponsorships weren't deemed market value, at worst we'd have knocked our revenue down a bit and we'd have failed FFP by £10m more, which isn't significant and doesn't justify the new investigation in my view. Particularly as the 2014 settlement had already been over this ground. So we can assume it's not about that per se therefore.
The most likely explanation is that UEFA is accusing us of hiding the fact that the sponsorships weren't fully funded by the companies involved, which it didn't know in 2014 (but the information was there, in the public domain so you could argue that it was a known fact that Etihad weren't responsible for the full funding of our sponsorship). But if they were related parties, as claimed by UEFA seemingly, then as I said above, it doesn't matter.
If they weren't related parties, which we and our auditors claim, then it's potentially more of a case. I said at the time that it would have been the clever move to accept that they were related. But UEFA would need to prove that the money came directly from ADUG and not from other sources within Abu Dhabi, which is why the definition of 'HH' is is quite crucial. If Etihad paid us £50m in one or more remittances and all but the reported £8m came direct from ADUG then we'd possibly have a problem, although it's far from certain. If however Etihad paid that full money to ADUG and it was sourced from somewhere else other than ADUG then it's none of their business.
What would land us in the shit is if UEFA could see separately identified remittances of £8m from Etihad and £42m from ADUG both booked as commercial income under the Etihad sponsorship arrangement. But if that was the case, they'd have seen that at the time of the 2014 investigation presumably.
