I largely kept my powder dry on this because I wanted to see all four parts of the story before forming a view, but given part 3 was so piss poor I think I have enough to articulate my thoughts.
The biggest criticism seems to be the complaint that City inflated sponsorship deals to circumvent FFP. Except they didn't inflate the sponsorship deals. The sponsorship deal with Asabar, for instance was £15m. Not £3m, or any other figure, but £15m. That's the amount that Aabar were contractually obliged to pay.
There is absolutely nothing in the FFPR that requires that any third party sponsorship money must, for instance, come from distributable profits. Where a third party gets the money from to sponsor a team is neither here nor there: what matters for the purposes of the FFPR is the sponsorship income. And in the case of Aabar, the amount of sponsorship income was £15m.
The complaint, when properly understood, cannot be that City overstated the sponsorship deal, because they didn't. They reported sponsorship from Aabar of £15m, which is exactly what the contract said. The complaint must be that Aabar would not have entered into that contract in the first place if it had not been made clear to them that £12m would be provided from elsewhere. So in other words, the value of the sponsorship was artificially inflated (assuming the emails are genuine).
That however does not contravene the regulations. Nowhere does UEFA get to impose its own 'true and fair' valuation of the sponsorship deals other than in the case of related party transactions, which IIRC Aabar wasn't. So, assuming the emails are genuine, and the additional sponsorship money actually originated from HHSM, did we breach the spirit of the regulations? yep. Did we take advantage of what the regulations don't say? Absolutely. Did we actually breach the regulations then in force? Absolutely not.
So the complaint when you boil it down to its bare essentials is that we found a way round the regulations, and didn't tell UEFA what we had done.
Well cry me a fucking river. We all know these regulations were designed as a means of ossifying the status quo and making it more difficult for a team to progress in that competition. Der Spiegel actually say that in terms - they say that City could (and they imply should) have lowered their on-pitch expectations. So if people want to cry about it now because we found an arguably immoral way round regulations that themselves were immoral from the get-go, me my guest.
For my own part, and if you are reading this Matthew Syed, I'm talking to you, I have an absolutely clear conscience. The club I support has breached no regulations, and the worst that can be said of them is that they have fought fire with fire. If you have a problem with that, feel free to write more of your sanctimonious shite. I have no problem with it whatsoever.