No doubt the snipers will be out shortly but just to be clear again.
- Nobody knows the outcome of the hearing except the panel. Of course, not impossible the draft came yesterday - but as of Wednesday it hadn't
- Parties will have a good feel after the hearing for those issues that were settled one way or the other vs those that it is too hard to tell (will know by the way the panel asked questions, general direction of travel of the hearing, performance of witnesses etc). Some things will have been abandoned, some things emphasised
- It is simply not true at all that the parties were told the nub of the result 3 months after the event or that the club doesn't know (whatever that means) but Khaldoon does - whoever has told Colin that is simply wrong. Personally, I feel persisting with this theory on here is misleading - given we are at June 2026, it couldn't possibly be true even if we didn't KNOW everything else we KNOW. To emphasise, the best City have (Khaldoon or anyone else) is an impressionistic view of how things went and, of course, advice and a deep understanding of how compelling City's own evidence was. Perhaps painful, but even Lord Pannick doesn't KNOW if City defended the most serious allegations aside from the points above
- That the club remains confident and approaching everything as business as usual is self evident
- Pep has not left because of 115
- Even if you don't believe me, Pannick himself has responded here (those emails are real and he would not lie or mislead on Blackstone email) and, as you'd imagine, gets asked about the case when in the outside world. As on email, he does not stonewall any question
- APT is irrelevant to the outcome of 115 partly because it couldn't be pleaded as it wasn't resolved
- No decision can take much longer than 19 months. As I have said we are now deep in outlier territory for any commercial arbitration, disciplinary, piece of litigation - decisions simply are not meant to take this long for the reasons I detailed in yesterday's article. I always warned it would take a long time but never imagined it could be in this extreme category. It is an embarrassment to the panel, completely unacceptable and, as I wrote yesterday, an invitation to challenge the entire process if it goes against one party and they want to challenge it
- From information I had a couple of weeks ago from a very senior Clerk, it does appear that the bulk of the drafting has been completed