It's like groundhog day. Anyway, we go again.
First, none of the "legal eagles" on here has said we're breaking either PL rules or the law. We've commented on what the PL seems to be accusing the club of doing, which is an entirely different thing, We can't be sure, because the level of detail thus far provided by the PL is inadequate to make that out with absolute certainty. However, the CAS proceedings offer us the best guide as we seek to analyse the position.
We're accused by the PL of breaching the duty contained in its rules to provide financial information that gives a true and fair reflection of the club's financial position "with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs". This is exactly the issue that dominated the CAS proceedings, and unless we're presented with evidence to the contrary, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to assume that the nature of the accusations from the PL is materially the same as that of the charges UEFA found proven against us.
Your argument, as far as I understand it, is that you don't see how City could, even if we did record shareholder funding as a sponsorship, have broken the law and you therefore don't accept that we've been accused of breaking the law. This is isn't a corollary. I think that UEFA acted risibly in imposing on us the penalty that they handed down based on the evidence at their disposal, but they nonetheless did so and to argue that they didn't is simply fallacious.
If we want to assess the true nature of UEFA's findings against us, we don't have to guess. We can refer to the 93-page
CAS Award, in which these issues are spelled out in detail. It's there in black and white: this document tells us exactly what UEFA found MCFC guilty of. In particular, between pages 8 and 12 of the CAS Award, the Panel summarises the nature of the UEFA decision we were appealing in the proceedings at hand. In doing so, the panel quotes directly from the Decision of UEFA's Adjudicatory Chamber, so we have the findings straight from the horse's mouth.
In particular, on page 9 (under the heading "
Audited financial statements ...", just in case anyone doubts what's being spoken about here), it's stated that an "incorrect treatment of sponsorship revenue is reflected in the financial statements for the years ended 31 May 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016". Further, as a result:
- by "overstating its sponsorship revenue in the [audited] annual financial statements of MCFC for each of the years ended 31 May 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 [MCFC] submitted to the FA [audited] financial statements which were not complete and correct"; and
- therefore, the "declarations, representations and confirmations made by [MCFC] ... that all submitted documents and information relating to the financial statements referred to above were complete and correct, were false".
On page 11, under the heading "Disciplinary measures", it's stated that the above constituted "
a series of very serious breaches, over [a four-year period]
which were committed intentionally and concealed". Moreover, when the club put forward its defence to UEFA, it did so "putting forward
a case that ADUG knew to be misleading". In other words, they outright accused our major shareholder of lying. And the aim of this systematic, dishonest conduct was to attempt "to
circumvent the objectives of [UEFA's FFP} Regulations".
I completely fail to see how anyone can read the CAS Award and reach a conclusion other than that UEFA was clearly accusing MCFC, acting through officers of the company, of conduct that, had it happened, would have constituted a serious criminal offence on the part of those officers. I've already cited the body of the offence for false accounting under section 17(1)(b) of the Theft Act 1968 and analysed at some length why the above conduct meets the definition.
The fact that individuals here may not agree with UEFA that MCFC's audited accounts in the period in question were actually misleading is neither here nor there. UEFA said they were. They accused us of deliberately falsifying them. I'm not saying that your opinions have no relevance or validity. They have relevance and validity in terms of whether we were guilty of charges brought against us, nit in terms of whether the charges were actually brought.
This, emphatically, doesn't mean I think we're culpable or that, even if the CAS panel had found against us, prosecutions under section 17 of the 1968 Act would have followed. But that doesn't lessen the seriousness of the charges with respect to which UEFA found MCFC guilty.
If people want to seek out legitimate reasons as to why I might be wrong in assuming (which is all I can do at this stage) that the PL's accusations with regard to sponsorship are as serious as those UEFA put forward, then please do. I'd love to hear those arguments. But in their absence, I think we have to presuppose that the PL is making out a similar case to UEFA. To characterise that case as surrounding minor accounting issues involving only technical breaches of the PL's own rules seems to me misleading, and certainly not borne out by the CAS Award.
I ultimately think it was outrageous for UEFA to put forward the case it did based on the evidence it had. Our club was dragged through the mud as a result. Now the PL seems to be repeating the exercise, and, if it's putting forward a similar case, it needs calling out on that. Mealy-mouthed refusals to face the truth by people who either haven't read or at least haven't understood the CAS Award seem to me to be entirely unhelpful.
As it stands, the PL seems to be happy to throw around accusations of incendiary seriousness, even though I take the point that it seems to be trying, in public, to downplay their nature. In my view, that doesn't matter in the slightest. It's the substance of the allegations and not how they're presented that counts. And if the PL wants to throw around allegations of this type, we shouldn't be complicit in diminshing them. LET THE PL FUCKING OWN THEM.
