PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

But there’s was all earnt, pools money allowing a championship club to break transfer records not a thing. Issuing shares against fa rules not a thing, poisoning schools kids to buy Scotland’s finest not a thing. Etc etc it’s so fucking tedious.
Nor murdered anyone. Heysel has almost been airbrushed from history. The club should have been dismantled the day afterwards. If the FA acted correctly, all those teams who missed out on Europe may well have had entirely different trajectories and become elite clubs. As it is, no compensation has ever been paid to those clubs and with 40 years interest the likes of Coventry, Oxford, Wimbledon etc etc could do with that money. Plus tthose that missed out because the coefficients had reduced the opportunity for that tailing off period during the ban.
 
We won’t get relegated, hypothetically if it did happen this club has a lot more capable people running it than when we’ve faced adversity in the past. Could you imagine the piss boiling if we were in the 4th tier receiving what we do from Etihad and the other related UAE sponsors. We’d piss the football league in no time.
Every game would be full and tv rights would go through the roof, all leagues would benefit from us been there, plus we would still be in the world club championship in 2025!
 
Let’s just say hypothetically that Mansour & Khaldoon wanted to disguise owner investment for a min. You would think that to carry out such a criminal act, both men would keep it in house. By that I mean, not erm tell anyone. Including Soriano, Pearce etc. Instead, apparently everyone knew and not 1 of those people has come forward to expose the crime of the century.

It’s just bugs me as to why the top man would share his criminal plan to anyone?

There is definitely that point that these people would have to be particularly stupid to be discussing financial fraud on emails. Then there is the point that they would have to be even more stupid to leave proof of it lying around the company here in the UK. Assuming these people aren't stupid (and they arent) then, ipso facto, the PL won't have access to any evidence of the alleged fraud, even if it was carried out, which is amazingly unlikely. And on top of all that, the premise that Etihad and Etisalat would only sign fair value sponsorship agreements if a private individual contributed what, to them, constitutes peanuts, in two regulated industries, is just so amazingly ridiculous as to be unbelievable. I can't believe for a minute the PL think they have a chance of success.
 
The problem with speculation about potential punishment is that there is nothing in the PL Handbook about the scale or severity of sanctions. UEFA published a clear tariff of penalties for failing FFP, dependent on the seriousness of the breach and whether it was a first or repeat offenc, so we can safely talk about the scale of any punishment in that situation. Everton may try to use that as part of their appeal.

But the PL doesn't, so in my opinion it's unhelpful to speculate, using words like 'relegation'. And, being pedantic, the PL can't relegate us, as they don't control the lower leagues. As with Bury and the EFL, they could potentially expel us and we'd have to apply to the EFL.

I know it's easy to be wise when you're not the one in front of the camera or microphone but I think my answer to the "What will happen if they're found guilty" question would have been something like "We just don't know. It will totally depend on whether we're found to have breached any of the specified rules in any of the specified years. There are no indicators as to potential sanctions in the PL's rules but, at the very, very worst, there's the possibility we could be expelled from the PL. But that would involve quite an egregious breach of those rules and I don't see that scenario as a likely outcome. Even in (in my view) the unlikely event that we are found to have committed a minor breach, the punishment should be proportionate".
Surely, after the Everton sanction, we can assume that if found guilty of serious breaches, it would result in a points deduction. And if Everton received a 10 points deduction, ours might exceed that.

Let's say the deduction would be 100 points. That would put us at the bottom of the PL for that particular season. The consequence of that would be relegation to the Championship.

If the points deduction was say 250 points, that would still put us at the bottom of the PL, and would relegate us down one tier. It's ludicrous to put all the leagues into one and place us between two teams that are in theory either side of 250 points below us. That just isn't a thing in sport. (That's not related to the quoted post. It's merely my take on suggestions we might end up playing derbies against FC United, or Maine Road FC.)
 
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There is definitely that point that these people would have to be particularly stupid to be discussing financial fraud on emails. Then there is the point that they would have to be even more stupid to leave proof of it lying around the company here in the UK. Assuming these people aren't stupid (and they arent) then, ipso facto, the PL won't have access to any evidence of the alleged fraud, even if it was carried out, which is amazingly unlikely. And on top of all that, the premise that Etihad and Etisalat would only sign fair value sponsorship agreements if a private individual contributed what, to them, constitutes peanuts, in two regulated industries, is just so amazingly ridiculous as to be unbelievable. I can't believe for a minute the PL think they have a chance of success.
Apparently they’ve heard a strong rumour that there is a piece of paper with “we done it, it’s a fair cop, signed the Sheik” written in crayon.
Smoking gun…..
 
Did we? So we’re in the shit then?

I imagine the club definitely didn't include the payments to Mancini or the image rights payments to players (once they were sold to a third party) in the annual accounts, but they shouldn't have done so, either. So there is no problem with the accounts.

There may be a dispute on whether those amounts should have been reported to the PL or not, but no-one is getting a points deduction for a difference of opinion.

And to answer the other point raised. It isn't an act of bad faith to report in the way you think is correct, so the PL would have to prove it was a deliberate decision to mislead, and that would be difficult. In any case, it's a reporting issue and wouldn't be anywhere near enough to a sporting sanction, imho.
 

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