PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

Harris must have seen my posts and screen grabs from his X/Twitter page that I posted on the thread yesterday. :-)

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Who's watching?
Tell me, who's watching?
Who's watching me?


I follow @projectriver on twitter and when he advertised the podcast of himself and nut job harris discussing the charges, I listened and then replied to Steffan saying what a great listen it was and how I enjoyed that he put harris back in his box
I didn't copy harris in and for some reason there were tweets appearing on my timeline where I was blocked
Yip, harris blocked me even though I'd had no interaction with his account and I certainly had no interest in his tweets
He must have sat there reading the replies to Steffan and gone on a blocking rampage
 
My theory is Harris might have received a letter from City. At the same time he had no way of ranting nor enhancing his repertoire after the fallout from Stefan's podcast chat. He's got the best of both worlds now. Ranting behind anonymous accounts and engaging at length with Stefan under the new account. Magic is really pouring a LOT of effort into this and the late night ranting is trademark Nick. We'll never prove it's Nick, unless he really slips up like up. But he's unwell and will probably post something to suggest he's away whilst magic hat continues to post.. the Arsenal chat is so limited it can't be an Arsenal fan. The time and effort is deranged.
 
Our friend Mr Hat, in discussion with Stefan about auditors, makes the following statement… saying auditors couldn’t determine anything about the following….

The alleged events that resulted in the charges relevant here are:
- Payments of owner funds (equity) to sponsors, onto Man City; and
- Off the book payments from related parties to subsidise payments that Man City would otherwise have had to make


I’m just checking, but we’re not alleged to have done this are we - I thought the issue was we were accused of receiving funds directly from the owner instead of the sponsor. He’s right in that if the sponsor pays us, it’s irrelevant to anyone how they themselves fund that payment and so an auditor of City couldn’t and wouldn’t care. And presumably there’s no PL or UEFA rule against it.

Am I right?
 
Our friend Mr Hat, in discussion with Stefan about auditors, makes the following statement… saying auditors couldn’t determine anything about the following….

The alleged events that resulted in the charges relevant here are:
- Payments of owner funds (equity) to sponsors, onto Man City; and
- Off the book payments from related parties to subsidise payments that Man City would otherwise have had to make


I’m just checking, but we’re not alleged to have done this are we - I thought the issue was we were accused of receiving funds directly from the owner instead of the sponsor. He’s right in that if the sponsor pays us, it’s irrelevant to anyone how they themselves fund that payment and so an auditor of City couldn’t and wouldn’t care. And presumably there’s no PL or UEFA rule against it.

Am I right?

No. :)
 
My theory is Harris might have received a letter from City. At the same time he had no way of ranting nor enhancing his repertoire after the fallout from Stefan's podcast chat. He's got the best of both worlds now. Ranting behind anonymous accounts and engaging at length with Stefan under the new account. Magic is really pouring a LOT of effort into this and the late night ranting is trademark Nick. We'll never prove it's Nick, unless he really slips up like up. But he's unwell and will probably post something to suggest he's away whilst magic hat continues to post.. the Arsenal chat is so limited it can't be an Arsenal fan. The time and effort is deranged.
I wonder where our very own "ono" is nowadays / ;)
 
Our friend Mr Hat, in discussion with Stefan about auditors, makes the following statement… saying auditors couldn’t determine anything about the following….

The alleged events that resulted in the charges relevant here are:
- Payments of owner funds (equity) to sponsors, onto Man City; and
- Off the book payments from related parties to subsidise payments that Man City would otherwise have had to make


I’m just checking, but we’re not alleged to have done this are we - I thought the issue was we were accused of receiving funds directly from the owner instead of the sponsor. He’s right in that if the sponsor pays us, it’s irrelevant to anyone how they themselves fund that payment and so an auditor of City couldn’t and wouldn’t care. And presumably there’s no PL or UEFA rule against it.

Am I right?
I believe those were a couple of the allegations made against us by UEFA

It's one reason everyone can't wait for the Etihad accounts be released into the public domain when the airline is floated
 
Our friend Mr Hat, in discussion with Stefan about auditors, makes the following statement… saying auditors couldn’t determine anything about the following….

The alleged events that resulted in the charges relevant here are:
- Payments of owner funds (equity) to sponsors, onto Man City; and
- Off the book payments from related parties to subsidise payments that Man City would otherwise have had to make


I’m just checking, but we’re not alleged to have done this are we - I thought the issue was we were accused of receiving funds directly from the owner instead of the sponsor. He’s right in that if the sponsor pays us, it’s irrelevant to anyone how they themselves fund that payment and so an auditor of City couldn’t and wouldn’t care. And presumably there’s no PL or UEFA rule against it.

Am I right?
Yup.
 
What are the odds on two people being up at 12.51am at the same time? Even in conflicting time zones, when one is more likely to be wanting their bed and the other is having his dinner?
Given any thoughts on Magic hat being Timothy Key proprietor of magic hat productions and I believe a red dipper, hiding in plain sight.
 
My theory is Harris might have received a letter from City. At the same time he had no way of ranting nor enhancing his repertoire after the fallout from Stefan's podcast chat. He's got the best of both worlds now. Ranting behind anonymous accounts and engaging at length with Stefan under the new account. Magic is really pouring a LOT of effort into this and the late night ranting is trademark Nick. We'll never prove it's Nick, unless he really slips up like up. But he's unwell and will probably post something to suggest he's away whilst magic hat continues to post.. the Arsenal chat is so limited it can't be an Arsenal fan. The time and effort is deranged.
If the club’s lawyers wanted to prove Magic Hat is Nick Harris, then it's trivial. AI based Anti Plagiarism software will return a "same author probability" in the high 90% range if there is sufficient sample text. Because he's been prolific as Magic Hat in the last few days that won't be an issue. Assuming City have issued a C&D letter then he would be in deep shit. They could seek an injunction to stop him spewing out his continuous stream of bile. More likely they just consider him an irritant ie of no consequence to anyone. When all this is over how will he fill the void in his life ? He may become the journalistic equivalent of the Japanese soldier who carried on fighting for 30 years after WW2 ended. Alternatively, he may be funded by someone at "war" with the UAE. My guess would be whoever commissioned the You Tube attack video (which he appeared in) are paying him to this present day, ie to continue with his hate filled tirades. Or as someone mentioned, he's hoping to sell a book one day. I can just see huge queues outside Waterstones waiting for signed copies of a racist book full of hacked emails, spreadsheets and PL regulations.
 
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Our friend Mr Hat, in discussion with Stefan about auditors, makes the following statement… saying auditors couldn’t determine anything about the following….

The alleged events that resulted in the charges relevant here are:
- Payments of owner funds (equity) to sponsors, onto Man City; and
- Off the book payments from related parties to subsidise payments that Man City would otherwise have had to make


I’m just checking, but we’re not alleged to have done this are we - I thought the issue was we were accused of receiving funds directly from the owner instead of the sponsor. He’s right in that if the sponsor pays us, it’s irrelevant to anyone how they themselves fund that payment and so an auditor of City couldn’t and wouldn’t care. And presumably there’s no PL or UEFA rule against it.

Am I right?
Taking your first point, there are FFP rules about owner investment. If the auditor's brief included FFP compliance then it's possible they might ask the question about where the money had come from for the Abu Dhabi linked sponsorships.

However, the Etihad sponsorship was seemingly paid in two chunks, one from Etihad and another larger chunk from central funds (but quite possibly also remitted from Etihad). As an auditor you'd probably question that arrangement and given the sums involved, you'd want to be quite certain it was OK.

As for off-the-book payments, you almost certainly wouldn't see those by definition if they were paid by third parties. But even if we were trying to hide the Fordham image rights payments, there was a direct link to Fordham from City. As an auditor, seeing that company had changed its name from Manchester City Football Club (Image Rights) Limited, you'd want to know why and what the company was set up for. You'd also surely notice that image rights payments formerly paid by City, now weren't being paid by them, and you'd want to know why.

Auditors should be looking for anything unusual, and asking questions until they get a satisfactory answer. I was involved in a couple of audits in my accountancy days, one where we noticed significant sums going through an account that didn't seem right for that account. When we investigated further, it turned out to be a major fraud, which was very high profile at the time.

Another client was a casino group, and I noticed a couple of odd things that were nothing to do with the accounting side of things but indicated potential collusion between dealers and punters. It turned out I was right.
 

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