PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

Matt Diablo said:
As I said from the off - one of our main guys knew it was all a load of rehashed CAS bs from day 1
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It's yesterday's fish and chip paper, recycled three times now.

That twat Klopp has a lot to answer for, his 'bad day for football' comment, following the CAS verdict, basically encouraged a pile-on over here and forced the Premier League to try again, so pissed were the media and red shirts by the not guilty announcement.

The Premier League's new PSR rules just helped bump up the charge sheet and enhance the plot to slur the club and diminish its achievements.

City's 'Once and for All' statement was a threat to the whole 18 years of slurs and patronising.

This will be our greatest win. The Zenith of this Club. You can win trophies, you can win Champions Leagues and Trebles.

What you can't do is be accepted at the top table of football in less than two decades.

Unless, of course, that Club is owned by Sheikh Mansour and run by Khaldoon al Mubarak.

Highly political animals who have kept their powder dry, having been constantly smeared by all the old guard establishment.

When this is all over, we won't own football but NOBODY will dare fuck with us again.
 
tolmie's hairdoo said:
There are always caveats people can rightly offer up, break clauses and the like.

However, that's not what City have offered or were asked for.

They have given firm assurances to various groups who would rightly feel wary of pitching their tent up during this period.

City's legal team will have already received various back and forth from the respective counsels, certainly enough for our Board to become emboldened.

The APT case was a huge flare going up that City and the Premier League have ceased hostilities.

The allowance of Etihad uplift was another indicator to the peanut gallery.

As for Revolut, they don't need to enter any such arrangement with City before a verdict is made public.

They have a banking license and float to concern themselves with and don't need any guilt by association.

Both things can be true, there is no verdict and City are still waiting for it to drop.

A bit like a boxer who is a clear winner on points, they know they have won the fight, both in terms of the overall visuals and conviction.

Thankfully, these are highly skilled KC judges not homers and City aren't gonna be fucked over on the scorecards.
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The boxing analogy is spot on mate.
 
Chris in London said:
Yep.

A number of individuals seem to have drawn precisely the same conclusion around that time as well.
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It smacked of concessions and people being allowed to wipe their eye and shake hands.

To this day, I believe that was the Trojan horse.

The Premier League don't want Newcastle doing what City did on steroids.

Which is why we took that action on our own.
 
tolmie's hairdoo said:
It's yesterday's fish and chip paper, recycled three times now.

That twat Klopp has a lot to answer for, his 'bad day for football' comment, following the CAS verdict, basically encouraged a pile-on over here and forced the Premier League to try again, so pissed were the media and red shirts by the not guilty announcement.

The Premier League's new PSR rules just helped bump up the charge sheet and enhance the plot to slur the club and diminish its achievements.

City's 'Once and for All' statement was a threat to the whole 18 years of slurs and patronising.

This will be our greatest win. The Zenith of this Club. You can win trophies, you can win Champions Leagues and Trebles.

What you can't do is be accepted at the top table of football in less than two decades.

Unless, of course, that Club is owned by Sheikh Mansour and run by Khaldoon al Mubarak.

Highly political animals who have kept their powder dry, having been constantly smeared by all the old guard establishment.

When this is all over, we won't own football but NOBODY will dare fuck with us again.
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tolmie's hairdoo said:
It smacked of concessions and people being allowed to wipe their eye and shake hands.
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Especially when you think that at that time:

(A) there was another hearing outstanding on the challenge to the latest incarnation of the APT rules

(B) they were on the hook for the costs of the first two hearings and

(C) we had a claim for compensation arising from them unlawfully blocking three sponsorship deals

Good time for the League to shake hands and get on with the rest of their lives
 
Chris in London said:
Especially when you think that at that time:

(A) there was another hearing outstanding on the challenge to the latest incarnation of the APT rules

(B) they were on the hook for the costs of the first two hearings and

(C) we had a claim for compensation arising from them unlawfully blocking three sponsorship deals

Good time for the League to shake hands and get on with the rest of their lives
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Spot on, mate.

They were given an off-ramp which only the person with the whip hand can ever offer.
 
Chris in London said:
Especially when you think that at that time:

(A) there was another hearing outstanding on the challenge to the latest incarnation of the APT rules

(B) they were on the hook for the costs of the first two hearings and

(C) we had a claim for compensation arising from them unlawfully blocking three sponsorship deals

Good time for the League to shake hands and get on with the rest of their lives
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I find it a little strange that the PL were in such a hurry to get rid of the old PSR rules in favour of something new and lost their appetite for prosecuting FFP breaches. From being a vital part of financial control to being unceremoniously ditched, all within a pretty short period of time. Almost like when they were in a hurry to get new APT rules in place after APT1.
 
halfcenturyup said:
I find it a little strange that the PL were in such a hurry to get rid of the old PSR rules in favour of something new and lost their appetite for prosecuting FFP breaches. From being a vital part of financial control to being unceremoniously ditched, all within a pretty short period of time. Almost like when they were in a hurry to get new APT rules in place after APT1.
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Whichever way you look at it - it’s not good governance- and stinks of interference from certain clubs pursuing their own hostile agendas, and the EPL being manipulated into actions and behaviours that are inconsistent with its role as a regulator.
 
Chris in London said:
Why would you set that possibility aside?
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I was only doing it because Keith Moon expressed a disdain for conspiracy theories and was having the discussion on his grounds.

It seems very reasonable to me that this was pushed by certain influental, historically successful and predominantly red wearing clubs and the league bowed to their special boys.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
The Fordham stuff is about payment of image rights. HMRC generally allow 10% of players' remuneration to be paid for use of their image and that payment is made to their personal service companies rather than via PAYE. So from the club's perspective it reduces their liability to income tax and NI. The players then have to account for that 10%, via whatever tax regime is in place where they're liable to pay that.

HMRC is involved in investigations into some clubs it believes have abused this, but I don't believe we are one of those. United are, however, and I've been told that their potential liability (as demanded by HMRC) may be very substantial, potentially around £100m. I can't vouch for that though.

So image rights are paid separately, although have to be reported to the PL & UEFA as part of players' total remuneration. Prior to 2013, City paid these through a company called Manchester City Football Club Image Rights. But in 2013 they made an arrangement to sell those for around £25m to a company called Fordham Sports Image Rights, which was supposedly unconnected to City (although they're named on our Companies House filings, so aren't secret).

The reason for that sale, as far as I'm aware, was to generate additional revenue when we were trying to ensure we met UEFA' criteria for avoiding sanctions as a result of the first FFP assessment. We had to record a loss of no more than about £55m to do this, but we needed to bring in around an additional £50m to achieve this, which we did via the Fordham IP sale and setting up 2 new subsidiaries to supply services to all CFG clubs, which brought in about another £25m.

As I mentioned the other day, UEFA made that strategy useless by moving the goalposts subtly but, for us, significantly. It's highly unlikely we'd have gone ahead with the Fordham sale if we'd known that upfront, but Fordham now paid the image rights to players, and seem to have been reimbursed for that from Abu Dhabi. That means that part of the players' remuneration clearly didn't go through our books, unless we reimbursed Abu Dhabi in some way. It wasn't a huge amount annually, probably around £12-13m, and I doubt it made any difference to passing or failing FFP/PSR but I think that's where we're possibly most vulnerable. However it has to be taken into account that we didn't do it to reduce expenditure, but to bring in revenue. So we could use that to counter any suggestion we didn't act in utmost good faith.

The key question though is did we declare those payments to the PL/UEFA as part of our annual financial submissions? We know that UEFA spoke to us about Fordham in 2015, and the arrangement ceased a couple of years later. In truth, we didn't need it by then so there was no point in maintaining it. There was no sanction for this, and it wasn't raised in the original FFP case, which possibly suggests UEFA might have had concerns about it, but there was no rule breach and we declared all remuneration fully.
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I seem to recall that Wayne Rooney’s image rights deal was in the original Footyleaks cache as well as the Ronaldo rape allegations. But the media just ignored the Rooney story. If what you say is correct that they owe £100m, then it begs the question why the PL has not investigated United’s finances retrospectively.
 
Keith Moon said:
We’re not guilty of disguising owner investment as sponsorship. It’s a bizarre accusation — why on earth would HH Sheikh Mansour need to top up Abu Dhabi sponsorship with his own money?

We may be guilty of helping Roberto Mancini avoid tax in Italy.

The Yaya / Fordham stuff is above my pay grade — we might be guilty of something, but it feels like a matter for HMRC rather than the Premier League.

Not guilty of breaching UEFA’s FFP.

Not guilty of breaching PSR.

Guilty of not cooperating with the Premier League.
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And why should we cooperate with this jumped up kangaroo series of charges? Part of me wants us to be guilty of that because that in itself would make a statement.
 
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