City launch legal action against the Premier League | City win APT case (pg901)

[Matt Diablo]

Lets all pray, chant or whatever this shit doesn't go on for ever!

 

[hammocity]

There 350m loan is 0% so they bring the loan to be fair market they'll owe a lot more plus if they back date it

Not being pedantic but they won't "owe" it, a PIK would be applied to the accounts to reflect the commercial value of the loan with regards to APT rules.

 

[bluemoon32]

 

[wolviedinho]

This is a great read, onwards amd upwards :-)

I was enthralled by Ferran Soriano’s 8-minute talk as he laid out Man City plans

The Manchester City CEO spoke ahead of the club’s latest title-winning documentary.

www.manchesterworld.uk

Someone needs to inform Soriano that we have 115 charges of financial fraud staring us in the face. No point planning for the future, we should be planning for our death.

Building a stadium extension and keeping Pep for 2 more seasons at least is a clear sign as any that the club ain’t bothered about the witch hunt.

City as a club is about to enter a new period of excellence. We can now start from a position of strength with a winning history of the treble and 4 in a row.

Don’t see anyone wanting to abandon ship.

 

[Stoned Rose]

I don't agree with this at all.

Nothing in the APT case could save City if they had faked their biggest contracts for a decade and then lied repeatedly to the outside world including auditors and multiple other parties.

We always knew why the APTs were introduced (for Newcastle and because nobody believed certain parties were not related and/or related was not a sufficiently strong test). There was nothing revelatory there.

If there was a point here City would not have waited to the Feb 2024 changes before launching their challenge. The APT challenge specifically followed amendments that City warned went too far. They did not challenge 2021 APT either then or after Feb 2023.

The 115 breaches are not about being related or fair value in the absence of there being concealment of some relevant facts (such as outright lies about whether Etihad is related). The idea the PL could undermine the auditors over 14 years (not to mention UEFA and CAS) as to the related party aspects of that is not plausible. And those matters would not be challengeable now in any event in my view due to statute of limitations. They are about serious allegations of false accounting that even if the whole PSR had been found unlawful would not save City if the allegations were proved.

In short, construing this connection in this way is wrong. Any connection is far more subtle.

 

[Gingers Dad]

The ESL would only become a success if the best teams are in it and that assumes that there is no more lucrative alternative. If FIFA came up with, say, a Club World Cup, where the prize money dwarfed that of the ESL, even if the clubs didn't follow, the players soon would. And that would kill the ESL.

I see a golf-style schism heading football's way.

PL is a great competition. Most of the leagues in Europe are already 2 team leagues at best. Fans all around the world will either watch the ESL or the PL, whichever is better.

 

[Gingers Dad]

I think it would be massive initially but i dont think the interest would be sustainable, like i have said previously the big games between these teams are a rarity so they garner interest when they become the norm the interest will go away its destruction through over saturation, it happens with alot of products take prime as the most recent example when it was rare people were fighting over it paying ridiculous prices per bottle then they flooded the market and now they cant give it away.

This new CL format is as dull as dishwater to most of us. After 8 rounds of games no team of any significance to the latter stages of the competition will drop out. Somehow they are managing to sell it as an exciting "new format".

 

[Gone for a Burton]

Brighton have enjoyed £373 million of interest free shareholder loans.

....almost TWICE what HH Sheikh Mansour paid for all of City.

No loans.
No Dividends
No Profit extractions.

Pure reinvestment in sporting and commercial excellence.

Manchester thanks you Sheikh Mansour.

DELICIOUS !!

 

[halfcenturyup]

But it's clear there's a connecting thread.

We now know that some clubs pressed for the introduction of APT rules because they felt that we were deliberately flouting IAS 24. I absolutely agree with you that there's no possible interpretation of that standard which makes City & Etihad related parties.

We still don't know exact details of the PL charges but they specifically mention sponsorships and related parties. It's therefore likely that the issue of related parties is one of the core issues at the heart of those charges (although it's largely irrelevant if the Etihad contract is held to be legitimate and fair value).

I accept that the timescale of the APT rules' introduction is more likely to be related to the Newcastle takeover. But there's clearly (in my view) a link between the PL charges and their mention of related parties, and the APT rules, which are an attempt to get round IAS24.

I think you are both right :)

But the extent to which one of you is more right than the other is shrouded in the mystery of what the club's strategy is here.

We will get some more clarification after the tribunal closes its process, I suppose. But, until then, all this is way above anyone's pay grade on here, imho.

I said after the initial judgment that we should all wait to see what develops before judging who "won" what and I think that is still the case here.

There is more going on behind the scenes than we know about and the optimist in me says the PL's rush to get new rules in place is more desperate than City's patient and well thought-out approach. But we will see.

Otoh, what the fuck do I know?

 

[Chris in London]

Fair point but the Americans do have a knack of selling stuff and I think they'd surround each game with so much razzmatazz it'd draw people in . A bit like Sky but more .....nauseating

If you remember the birth of Sky, they had dancing girls, bands on the pitch before the game, an awful lot of razzmatazz, and it quickly died a death.

It's just not what UK based fans either expect or want. Imagine it before a City game. The stands would carry on being empty until just before kick off because 50,000 blues want to get the beers in before the match. All that glitziness won't look good in an empty stadium.