UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST

[Ardwick Green Blue]

Manchester City could be relegated to league two , FFS heard it all now.

Why stop there? We might have to work our way up from the eighth tier of English football. Maybe a derby with FCUM is all we can look forward to :(

 

[squirtyflower]

I thought it was due to tunnel club? Didn’t realise the press area had got bigger?

When they built the tunnel club the press area was moved into our section.
Don’t see why they didn’t put the ****s in the third tier at Old Trafford

 

[toffee balls]

“Arab owners seek to curtail freedom of speech in Western democracy” etc and so on. The rabid Daily Mail writers like Harris, Herbert and Ladyman would have a field day.

But surely, we as fans can somewhat shall we say “ influence them” at The Etihad.

 

[Metalartin]

I honestly can`t understand the mentality of some of my fellow Blues who want us to boycott the home leg v Madrid.
This is the time to show the Club,the Players and most of all UEFA that we are all behind the Club.
Come on lads and lasses lets NOT be silly and take it out on the Players first and foremost !!
I suspect the noise level for that UEFA theme tune will make the Kop sound like a fucking school choir.

Exactly, the one chance, with this fresh in the minds of everyone who will be watching, to make our voices heard and people want to do the silent treatment?

I think the club will let in as many anti UEFA banners as they like, supporters clubs, should run a massive display past the club reps to really send a statement in my view. Although that might be a step too far for the club to condone it officially.

 

[Manc in London]

Along with most who suddenly joined in nov dec including the twat who sent me abusive pm,s last night

I trust you reported the weirdo

 

[Rammy Blue]

Not the way Rammy are playing this season!

Top of the league, would be fun, lol.

 

[brummie blue]

Nah, fuck em. We’ve done NOTHING wrong. Absolutely nothing.

Spot on, I want us to sue uefa for everything, loss of earnings, time spent defending this charade, the lawyers costs, deformation, anything we can pin on it. Then we move onto the media and football outlets that have fuelled it and sue them as well.

Time to find some balls and come out fighting instead on being nice to everyone. Disliked Fergie at the best of times, but if a journalist stepped out of line, they'd not be at the swamp again, some bans went on for years.

 

[jollylescott]

After listening to an American lawyer (a City fan) on a podcast today, he stated that CAS generally takes on average about 15 months to make a decision. This would effectively postpone any Chumps League ban for at least one season, and possibly two. He also explained potential civil action before the Swiss Supreme Court, which could challenge the fundamental basis of FFP. Even if City wanted an expedited process, I can’t see that happening because of the evidentiary demands on each side.

I perused the CAS decision, which has just been been posted on their website, in regard to City challenging the hacked emails. They found it ‘worrisome’, but ultimately chose not to find in City’s favour because City had not exhausted the appeals process. It’s worth looking at because of the highly legalistic nature of the written decision, and explains why in part why the process takes so long.

 

[tornandfrayed]

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.

re your final paragraph
If UEFA are claiming that this has just been brought to their attention despite being clear at the time can we respond by bringing up the way they changed the regulations at the last minute to ensure we failed ffp initially?

 

[bobbyowenquiff]

I think she’s far more pro-active than many people give her credit for. The problem is we’re not holding that many cards. If you think we get a bad press now, it would be a million times worse if we started banning journalists.

Much as think the club has been far too passive with its media management in recent years this would be the worst possible time to go on the offensive. We can't really do anything now (apart from rebut false stories in the media) till we know the CAS result.