PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

willipp said:
Wow powerful stuff and i presume Khladoon will know all this better than anyone. It would be an incredibly reckless and unnecessary risk he took if we are guilty. What you say just re assures me that we will come out on the right side of this.
Click to expand...

Unnecessary is the key word. You are talking about people with extreme wealth. Why would they risk it all by carrying out fraudulent activity at a football club which is small beer compared to other projects?

There are very few high profile cases of fraud and those that have occured are due to a lack of liquid assets and processes to create an impression of wealth that didn't exist. Our owners have buckets of cash, there's no need to pretend it exists or funnel it fraudulently.
 
mexico1970 said:
Children collected cards and magazines with any team on the front middle or back, so to that degree it wasn't tribal.

However I don't know of anyone who took in a rag match one week and a City match the next mate.
Click to expand...

I saw my first City game at Maine Road in 1954, taken by a friend's dad who was a rag supporter, but who liked to watch football, and so went to City one week, and the rags the following week.

Nothing like the same rivalry/animosity between fans then.

Following Munich I think it changed dramatically with the swell of support for the rags.
 
Damocles said:
They believe Khaldoon to be the most actually powerful man in the UAE because he sits at the apex of their political, Governmental and economic systems and ties them all together. He is one of MbZ's closest advisors and accompanies him on state visits (as we saw with Trump). While doing this, he also actively runs Mubadala.

Khaldoon is from a very well to do family but not one of the ruling families. His father was the Ambassador to France and murdered in Paris when Khaldoon was a little boy and obviously his family were taken care of extremely well by the Al Nahyans. He grew up with the brothers essentially and was also educated in the US.

Khaldoon has two major advantages which is why he the Western countries like him. Firstly, he speaks their language. While he is absolutely aware of what some Westerners would call the "weird tribal stuff", he dodges this and wants to talk about global capital markets and social pressures and investment opportunities. He is someone that Westerners can feel comfortable around instead of the guys wearing traditional robes. Secondly, as he is not a Royal but instead just really close to them, he has an agility to pursue other things that they cannot. It would be entirely inappropriate for Sheikh Mansour to go on the City website and give interviews about the season for example, but it's fine for Khaldoon. His lack of Al Nahyan blood is actually a plus point for him rather than a negative. He's not a nepotism hire, he is an extremely competent man which is why he is where he is.

While Sheikh Mansour was your average C student, Khaldoon was the opposite. A very charismatic and personable student who worked hard and excelled. He picked up the language well.

Khaldoon's power is obvious from how we look at it, but he is still beholden to MbZ. He is MbZ's guy more than Mansour's guy if such a distinction even really makes sense. Everybody is MbZ's guy. But because he holds certain titles and positions and is a trusted advisor then because of how we in the West understand power structures and because he is more approachable then we see "the most powerful man in the UAE".
Click to expand...
And he jeopardised all of this so that we could pay Wilf Bony..
 
Keith Moon said:
One thing that people forget in our case is that HH Sheikh Khalifa was the ruler of Abu Dhabi and the President of the UAE for the first five years. MBZ didn’t gain full power until January 2014, when Khalifa had a stroke.
Click to expand...
I've never worked out Sheikh Khalifa and MbZ. Obviously after the stroke, he was a puppet. However there's a narrative around the MbZ was elevated to "Chief Advisor" type role all the way back in 2004 when he was appointed as Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council.
But with like most of these stories, it came out after the death of Sheikh Khalifa and makes MbZ look like the "legitimate" ruler so could well be complete bollocks and propaganda. As I say, even the Governments don't know and they have guys who spend their entire working lives trying to navigate this stuff. Someone like me who reads a few books or papers about it has no chance.

You can see in this cable from the US Embassy that they refer to "Khalifa and MbZ's Government".


It also references how one of the elder brothers of the Bani Fatima was removed from Government positions for being "too influenced by the Majlis circle" or to put into terms we'd get, he was too Arab and not business enough. It's the equivalent of going down the pub and having everyone whinge at you so then going to say the same in Cabinet meeting. He's talking about the price of Carling while you're trying to talk about a £33bn oil trade deal.

So Khalifa represented the older and less educated and more tribal generation while MbZ represented the new business focused and less traditional generation. How the power dynamics played out here nobody really knows.
 
Colin Bells Boots said:
I saw my first City game at Maine Road in 1954, taken by a friend's dad who was a rag supporter, but who liked to watch football, and so went to City one week, and the rags the following week.

Nothing like the same rivalry/animosity between fans then.

Following Munich I think it changed dramatically with the swell of support for the rags.
Click to expand...


Ohhh I don't think it was the same rivalry I agree, but there was rivalry. Animosity was built by the media.





1880s

Hooliganism in the modern game of football in England dates back to its establishment in the 19th century. Individuals referred to as roughs were known to cause trouble at football matches in the 1880s, for example when they attacked the visiting team in a match between Aston Villa and Preston North End in 1885.
 
Fordyboy46 said:
Positives about being found guilty
1. If relegated, tourists and day trippers fuck off, hardcore city fans remain
2. Cheaper ticket prices you'd hope
3. Great awaydays again

Any more?
Click to expand...
So back to 30 odd thousand crowds in a stadium that hold twice as many. Watching shite football. Away days are still great anyway
 
Cellarite said:
Sorry to wade in here but I have to back up the other poster. You have been known to ramble on here.

For example, you made numerous posts on the thread "They can take our thread..." around ten years ago when Off Topic was briefly re-named "The Cellar" in tribute to Gaudino'sStolenCars. If I recall, there were some grounds to your complaints. You were correct in stating that a number of threads had been derailed. They were, but I'm not sure you knew the full picture.

It all started when Rascal started a movement called "Operation Twat". I was his right hand man and took a great deal of pride in my role. It lead to me dressing in the 2010 sash away kit, sky blue shorts and a silver skeleton mask in the tin aisle of my local Asda. I was Bluemoon's original Full Kit Wanker. Soon, more were on board. Charliebigspuds almost indecently exposed himself in what I assumed at the time to be one of his young children's City shorts.

One poster found himself in a hostage situation being forced at gun point to wear an Argentina national shirt. He said on the hostage video that it was me on the other side of the screen but I maintain that I was at Hull Fair with my own children at the time.

Time went on and we had events such as "start a thread beginning with the letter 'j'", "Criticise a City legend" (my target was Shaun Goater), "Fully support England on the match thread against San Marino" where people actually typed the word "Wazza" and all manner of antics designed to annoy the unwitting members of the forum who had zero awareness of Operation Twat.

Around this time, I was perma banned. There were a series of unfortunate incidents where I may have posted a picture of Gail Platt topless but when Ric found out I was using multiple accounts, the hammer came down and I was cast out. I was only allowed back on when I emailed him directly and begged forgiveness.

This was one of my favourite periods on Bluemoon, probably THE favourite. Another period was the first lockdown and in particular, when ITV re-ran the Euro 96 competition in its entirety. One night I was awake around four in the morning and read an epic rant by KentBlue which detailed a lot of his life regrets. I laughed so much that I had to go and drink my coffee in the back garden to avoid my giggling waking up the family. I still search that post from time to time. Another post I regularly search for is the exert from the made up autobiography of Nicolas Anelka. It describes and incident when he missed an open goal for Arsenal in a match against Charlton Athletic. He, according to the passage, returned to the home dressing room at Highbury only to be slapped across the face by Patrick Vieira who used his sizeable penis as a weapon. It really is worth a read if you're feeling low someday. Type the word "Boombaclart" into the search engine on here and it usually pops up.

Anyway, back on topic, I fully agree with @Winchester that you do indeed go on with yourself from time to time and further back on topic, the Premier League and Red Cartel can suck my rebelcock. We've done fuck all wrong.
Click to expand...
Great rambling fellah!
 
Colin Bells Boots said:
I saw my first City game at Maine Road in 1954, taken by a friend's dad who was a rag supporter, but who liked to watch football, and so went to City one week, and the rags the following week.

Nothing like the same rivalry/animosity between fans then.

Following Munich I think it changed dramatically with the swell of support for the rags.
Click to expand...
I think the early 60s were much different to the second half of the decade. Hooliganism really took off mid 60s. I remember the 1968 derby at Maine road being brutal. You might have seen an isolated one on one punch up in the early 60s but not widespread violence
 
Damocles said:
I'm not joking or being facetious here, but the problem that UEFA, the PL and the press have essentially boil down to this. They dont know who is who and put Western values onto a non Western culture that doesn't adhere to them
Click to expand...
The whole world assume that Mansour is a member of the UAE gov because he has the title Deputy Prime Minister. Not so, the title is complimentary.
 
TheGhost said:
It probably like me saying I used to go to watch Stockport when they played on a Friday night. I probably went about 3 or 4 times. But I’ve very rarely missed a game at Maine Road and the Etihad in 40+ years
Click to expand...
Back then you normally didn't need a ticket to get in. You might decide to pop along an hour or two before kick off. Some folk went to both grounds maybe 3 or 4 times a season at most. They were probably not ardent fans of either club.
 
KS55 said:
The PL claims of “associated” are based on this factor. Every single relationship we have with AbuDhabi companies is “associated” in their book, but not in any sensible reality. For example, what is associated about our sponsorship from the Palace Hotel? I was surprised when our legal team did not really push this in those hearings but there were probably reasons.
Both UEFA and the PL decide what outcome they want and then make up some nonsensical principle on which to base a rule.
Click to expand...
Private business interests do exist in the UAE and with the rulers. It's important to make that clear - while everybody belongs to MbZ, not everything belongs to MbZ. I just linked the cables before from the US but if you go through them then you'll read lots of instances in the early 00s of senior figures (who were replaced for it) trying to get kickbacks into their own private businesses.
But all the major companies of the level that might benefit from a City sponsorship deal are going to have all the same family names on their boards. This doesn't mean anything. They are separate and distinct companies. To be less diplomatic, half of these people don't actually do anything and some of them are literally losers who get shuffled by their advisors from one room to the next and hopes nobody asks them anything but have the right family name and the person who does do something needs to be seen as having one of these people on board.
Why does some business have a British royal on the board as the 485th in line to the throne? Same reason these do. What does that royal actually do? The same as half of the UAE guys.

AS I think @halfcenturyup noted before, Western accounting standards want things to be very neat and very delineated and very Western cultured. Applying them elsewhere when it comes to APT will only leads to madness. Qatar, the UAE, the Saudis, Bahrain, these aren't "countries" in the same way we think of countries. The "lines" were invented by the British and French a few hundred years ago. They're all one big nomadic people with interconnected families and tribes and marriages and names. Western understandings of how maps and countries work don't apply here. Attempting to separate businesses as the product of a single entrepreneur who makes singular decisions based on capitalist ideals is not how they operate.
 
Last edited:
I feel the press may press Pep about the verdict in the post-embargo section of the press conference. His answer 1,2,3,4 weeks was a little ambiguous. Does he mean he expects it within the next month, or has he no idea at all?

I don't know why the press don't pin him down a little bit more. He is evasive but surely he can say, I have no idea whatsoever, or it is overdue etc. His main focus is the effect on the players, but the fans are also thinking about this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top