How did these payments come to light during the due diligence process? If the payments were made by other Abramovich companies in offshore accounts, how were they found in Chelsea's books? And how do the new owners (or anyone) know the full extent of the leaks without having access to those company accounts?
Maybe the new owners already had wind of the Cyprus leaks and decided to come clean before the leaks surfaced.
So much for Chelsea cooperating fully and agreeing to stick to the rules on future (as they have promised to do). They then tested the rules to their absolute limits by selling assets to themselves, and trading youth players with other PSR threatened clubs. Hardly in the spirit of the rules.
Also, as
@Prestwich_Blue has pointed out, the Oscar transfer looked extremely dodgy at the time, as did the numerous David Luiz transfers.
My understanding is that the money was never paid via any of the clubs accounts.
Due diligence wouldn’t just be looking at the accounts and invoices it would be all over the place looking at for instance emails , little notes scribbled on a bit of paper and so on.
Let’s just suppose an agent says their fees are £2 million and there’s an email agreeing to that yet when the invoice comes in it’s only for £1 million. Unlikely to be picked up internally but during DD let’s suppose that email comes to light and gets checked back to the invoice and hey presto a massive question mark is added. Not saying that’s happened because I simply don’t know but I would imagine the people carrying out the DD would have been super skilled.
I am in no way justifying any of this but as I have pointed out on here before the hardest audits are those where nothing is in the accounts or supporting documents such as invoices.
We had defined boundaries where we could look when we carried out investigations during my working days.
As I may have already told the story on here one of my colleagues carried out an audit on a company and he couldn’t find a £1 incorrectly listed. The Directors deliberately weren’t around for the period my colleague and his team were at the company offices and had left a very junior member of staff to make coffee etc.
On the very last day my colleague when handing back core accounting documents said purely as a throw away comment something along the lines of “ These are fine can we now have the other set? “
With that the young clerk went to the safe and bought out a further cash book , another petty cash box and another set of paperwork detailing cash paid for their products and cash paid to suppliers of raw materials.
Cash really is king when it comes to dodgy dealings and when you have very rich owners I doubt they would struggle to get their hands on vast quantities of it.Indeed you don’t have to be rich how many can honestly say they haven’t paid cast to a tradesman to carry out work on their behalf ?
As for something being within the spirt of the rules sorry is that a thing? If the PL clubs had wanted to change the rules on any matter they could but choose not too
As for questioning sums paid in respect of transfers of course there are some that make you scratch your head but without hard evidence it’s no more than something put out there by conspiracy theorists.
