Nor does it mean that, as he seems to suggest, there must therefore be something wrong with them. Obviously, as we've done to death on here, if they're set up with a view to creating a fraudulent disguise for shareholder investment by portraying it as sponsorship income, then THAT would constitute (among other things) rule breaches along the lines of the accusations against City.
Otherwise, the arrangements presumably amount, in the final analysis, to: individuals at City with connections to the Abu Dhabi royals or government apparatus allowing AD publicly owned sponsors preferential payment delays by making funds available to MCFC pending reimbursement; AD public body shareholders of such companies providing the latter with funding to meet the sponsorships obligations; or a combination of the above.
OK, fine, but how does this constitute, as the ‘charge’ references, a failure to provide "in the utmost good faith ... accurate financial information that gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs". Maybe there's an argument it does, and the PL obviously thinks so. It's far from evident based on the information in the public domain, though, and the explanations in the preceding paragraph are IMO prima facie far more persuasive.
As pithily stated in the post I've quoted, this field isn't an area of strength for Herbert, a lamentable illiterate in serious legal and financial matters He proclaims himself a friend as well as a former colleague of Nick Harris, on whose judgement here he's in all probability relying. Yet while Harris is more knowledgeable than Herbert on these issues, the former’s proficiency is still grievously deficient itself and, moreover, is tainted by a stench rather than a whiff of manifest bias.
There are all kinds of issues potentially at play here, none of which either Herbert or even Harris is even close to capable of analysing in competent or credible fashion (as opposed to Nick’s detailed but myopic rehashes of the ‘prosecution’ case). I could speculate what the issues at hand might possibly be, but I'm really not sure that it serves any purpose. Nonetheless, in this monster of a thread they've all had an airing at some point anyway.
That said, unless City have been improbably and monumentally stupid in the drawing up and execution of the arrangements, I'd contend that they're really not especially likely to be the subject matter of the kind of fraud or deliberate concealment that would allow the statutory time-bar to be lifted for issues before season 2016/17. And it's hard to see how the accounts didn't give a "true and fair" view thereafter.
The latter argument seems to me to apply even if one accepts the wholly contentious premise that AD sponsors should have been declared as "related parties", at least as long as the fees under the relevant contracts were broadly at market value. No doubt our accounting brethren will pull me up on this one if I have it wrong.
TL, DR. Another year, another vacuous, cheerleading piece of simplistic clickbait bullshit from Herbert, coming close to straying over the border with outright mendacity if it doesn't actually do so. No surprises there. Still, I have to give the guy credit for one thing, namely his sheer chutzpah in being that grotesquely ugly yet being prepared even so to appear in public without a bag over his head. He has looks and intellectual ability on the same level.
