Please could someone explain why those convinced of our guilt find this so incriminating and then explain why in fact it isn’t. Much appreciated.
(Much too) simply: the emails are claimed to show Pearce was sending money to Etihad from Mansour to pay for the sponsorship. The words "I" and "we" doing a lot of heavy lifting in those emails for that point of view. Also supported by some internal presentations describing all AD sponsorships as "shareholder funding", rather foolishly.
The rest of us think the emails are misunderstanding Pearce's role in AD. It is not at all unusual for the EAA to be facilitating payments to state owned entities and Pearce is heavily involved with the EAA. The email quoted, in fact, is from his EAA email account. Personally, I think it's all a misunderstanding of the emails because people are reading them with a very Western, split of duties mentality when business in that part of the world, especially between state and state agencies and their suppliers are much more muddled.
It's a little complicated by Pearce's insistence at CAS that he had never arranged for payments to be made to Etihad (iirc) but the quoted email clearly shows he did. So the usual suspects shout perjury when, it seems to me, the two can be quite easily reconciled.
I don't have any explanation why internal presentations would describe AD sponsorship as shareholder investment, tbh, other than a big mistake that was presumably corrected at some point. But words on presentations do not a cogent case make.
Put simply. And probably wrongly :)