UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST

[Pablo ZZZ Peroni]

Without wanting to seem picky, but can anyone remember if there was a full stop after the "we can do what we want" e mail. It will be interesting if somebody can find and post them. They could just continue to say, within the terms of the contract. Anyway, since last Thursday I have avoided TV and papers and watched 4 series of Downton Abbey, Most of Faulty Towers and most of Rising Damp now looking for repeats of Judge Rinder to help me with the last few days of this thread

The following is directly copied from the Mediapart article linked earlier. We don't get to see the actual "we can do what we want" email just the bolded bit below:

Simon Pearce, a non-executive director at Manchester City, allegedly had another idea: “We could do a backdated contract for the next two years,” worth £5m a year, which “could be paid immediately”. Essentially modifying contracts.

How would the sponsors react to this? Pearce was apparently not worried: “the ones that I have real control over are Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA) and Aabar… We can do what we want.”

Shortly thereafter, ADTA’s sponsorship fee goes up by £5.5m, Ethiad’s fee by £1.5m and Aabar’s by £500k. Chumillas writes: “We have decided with Simon Pearce to modify the terms of certain sponsorship contracts with AD (Abu Dhabi).”

An audit that was undertaken at the demand of UEFA in 2014 concluded that the value of the contracts with Manchester City’s four Abu Dhabi sponsors, which made them €140m a year, were worth half according to market value. The sponsors don’t care, according to Mediapart, as it is Sheikh Mansour who is secretly funding them. Already in 2010, Pearce had planned for a £15m contribution from Aabar, before reassuring the firm: “We have discussed it, the yearly contribution of Aabar will be £3m. The £12m remaining will come from another source procured by His Highness.”

 

[blueparrot]

This is why I doubt Pearce was a witness and why I think it would be a negative indicator if he had been. Facts = matters that can be shown in documents.

This just me pondering things, but was thinking why there seems according to ric and tolmie, a fair amount of confidence around the club. Is it possible that we presented the irrefutable evidence, uefa accepted it and dropped the ban, but CAS still had to make a judgement on the uncooperative charge, and our defence of not trusting the confidentiality of UEFA I/C, with regards to a fine.
Obviously we can’t know but if a ban was ruled out during the hearing , due to our evidence it may explain the confidence that we will be in the champions league next season.
As I say complete speculation, guess we’ll know soon enough.

 

[Exeter Blue I am here]

City could well be in real difficulties if they allowed the appeal to revolve around what Pearce did NOT mean in those emails and our legal team is far too capable and experienced to have allowed it to happen. Sorriano set out right from the beginning that our appeal was based entirely on our being innocent of any claims that we had breached FFP in any way and that UEFA's assertions that we (presumably) inflated sponsorship deals are "not true, simply not true". Khaldoon claimed that we had presented a folder of evidence to the two chambers, which he claimed was "irrefutable". We can argue about his terminology but his meaning is clear. His view is that it is City's evidence - not any argument about who said what and meant what in which email - that would decide the case. My belief is that this evidence is the club's accounts, duly audited and supported by a statement from the auditors, backed up also by a statement from Etihad, and with receipts etc to show that they ars an accurate record. City are not trying to prove a negative, not trying to prove that we didn't breach FFP but are putting the onus on UEFA to show any evidence of real weight (and the emails are not) that we did. I cannot see how UEFA can.

I’m with you that it’s a source of reassurance that Khaldoon is as adamant that we have done nothing wrong as he is, but I’m not with you on the last couple of sentences. I actually don’t think UEFA has anything other than those emails in its armoury, but those emails are pretty unequivocal in their content (several different ones all on the same theme - namely you pay a fraction of the sponsorship, Sheikh Mansour will make up the rest) and they have been accepted as being of real evidential weight by one set of judges already.
Whilst a set of fully audited accounts would be helpful, if I were a CAS judge (and before anyone starts, I have no legal training whatsoever) I would want more than that. I would want a full and credible explanation for the content of those emails. Hopefully we’ve got one

 

[HelloCity]

That feeling you’ll get in your stomach when you get that notification on your phone from City ‘MCFC - CAS Outcome Statement’.

 

[OccupiedPalestineBlues]

The following is directly copied from the Mediapart article linked earlier. We don't get to see the actual "we can do what we want" email just the bolded bit below:

Simon Pearce, a non-executive director at Manchester City, allegedly had another idea: “We could do a backdated contract for the next two years,” worth £5m a year, which “could be paid immediately”. Essentially modifying contracts.

How would the sponsors react to this? Pearce was apparently not worried: “the ones that I have real control over are Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA) and Aabar… We can do what we want.”

Shortly thereafter, ADTA’s sponsorship fee goes up by £5.5m, Ethiad’s fee by £1.5m and Aabar’s by £500k. Chumillas writes: “We have decided with Simon Pearce to modify the terms of certain sponsorship contracts with AD (Abu Dhabi).”

An audit that was undertaken at the demand of UEFA in 2014 concluded that the value of the contracts with Manchester City’s four Abu Dhabi sponsors, which made them €140m a year, were worth half according to market value. The sponsors don’t care, according to Mediapart, as it is Sheikh Mansour who is secretly funding them. Already in 2010, Pearce had planned for a £15m contribution from Aabar, before reassuring the firm: “We have discussed it, the yearly contribution of Aabar will be £3m. The £12m remaining will come from another source procured by His Highness.”

On the point about modifying contracts. Why not?
A contract is what a contract does and the parties to any contract can modify, alter, revise, enhance etc. the contract between them - it's perfectly legal to do that because contracts are what the parties to a contract understand them to be, and not everything needs to be in writing.

 

[Sir peace frog]

I don't believe we have "irrefutable" evidence. Almost all evidence is refutable. Civil cases are decided by weighing both parties' evidence.

thats rubbish, the prosecution had irrefutable evidence on O.J. Simpso oh wait

 

[projectriver]

I agree irrefutable is very hard to prove in many different scenarios, but the point stands that one person has mentioned he may of been present, the poster himself admits he hears all sorts of information and quite a lot of the time that information has not been correct, not having a go at you or the OP who said it, but taking it as he did happen without virtually any actual knowledge of it seems to be posting for posting sake.

Anyhow, we all want the right outcome and hopefully whatever happened at CAS has already been decided and City have been cleared of any of this nonsense.

If it goes against us there will be about a thousand posts in ten minutes which will see about 20/30 posters banned, if it goes for us the same amount of posts but only about 10/15 posters banned ;)

I don't think we disagree that Pearce may or may not have given evidence. Personally, I doubt it but I am gaming out what it could mean if he did.

Fingers crossed

 

[OccupiedPalestineBlues]

thats rubbish, the prosecution had irrefutable evidence on O.J. Simpso oh wait

The OJ Simpson issue was due to civil and criminal courts having a different burden of proof. He wasn't found guilty in the criminal court but he was stripped of his last dime in the civil courts for exactly the same offence.

 

[Newman Noggs]

I would want a full and credible explanation for the content of those emails. Hopefully we’ve got one

Anybody would. No reply to questions posed by the investigators or, indeed, the charges could possibly avoid giving such an explanation. Which is why I think we would have no option but to put up the originator of those emails.

 

[Sir peace frog]

The OJ Simpson issue was due to civil and criminal courts having a different burden of proof. He wasn't found guilty in the criminal court but he was stripped of his last dime in the civil courts for exactly the same offence.

cough,cough WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH