Media thread 2022/23

[staffsblue]

I record it so that I can fast forward all the sycophantic nonsense. Have just watched it and thought Sam Lee did extremely well.
I was interested in Dion Dublin’s body language as well. So much so that I rewound the section and watched again to make sure I was not misinterpreting it. He seemed to be agreeing with a lot of what Sam was saying and I don’t mean just by nodding etc but by his facial expression. Especially when Sam was talking about the timing and the reasoning plus the 9 clubs. Maybe Dion is a closet believer in City’s innocence? Or am I being naïve and blue spectacled?! :-)

I was looking at Martin Keown's body language. He was awkwardly fiddling with his wedding ring while Lee was talking.

 

[MillionMilesAway]

I was looking at Martin Keown's body language. He was awkwardly fiddling with his wedding ring while Lee was talking.

I wonder if they'd been directed to keep schtum for that part so it was a journalist talking, but maybe they've done this long enough to know it's better to keep out of it.

Lee was good, I thought - may have to re-watch it again to see what Dublin and Keown are up to!

 

[Tb1981]

Pot, kettle, black from the Daily Sh!t Stirrer...


Daily Mail

Manchester City's rivals claim Pep Guardiola's attack may be libellous​

Story by Matt Hughes For The Daily Mail • Yesterday 22:31

Manchester City’s Premier League rivals reacted angrily on Friday to Pep Guardiola’s outspoken defence of the club’s alleged financial breaches, which many of them consider to be libellous.
Guardiola singled out Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and name-checked eight other clubs he said are lobbying against City, which he claims has pushed the Premier League into issuing more than 100 charges of breaking spending rules.
Guardiola’s outburst came a day after City chief executive Ferran Soriano was seen shaking hands with executives at other clubs at a Premier League meeting in London, a disconnect that has gone down very badly among other members of the top flight.
Several club executives told Sportsmail they strongly deny pushing the Premier League to take action against City, pointing out that the issuing of charges earlier this week followed a four-year investigation in which they played no part.
Levy has received messages of support from other Premier League clubs after Guardiola’s criticism.

Nicely written
So Brentford, Brighton, Leeds and Southampton probably aren’t arsed and haven’t pushed the premier league to dkk on anything
The rags, dippers and spurs (yes direct from levy)most definitively have.
Hence they won’t say anything on the record because they are scared
The leak everything and word it in a way that sounds the opposite of the truth

 

[halfcenturyup]

I wonder if they'd been directed to keep schtum for that part so it was a journalist talking, but maybe they've done this long enough to know it's better to keep out of it.

Lee was good, I thought - may have to re-watch it again to see what Dublin and Keown are up to!

I think it's clear people have been told to calm down. Question is: by the PL or by City. And if the PL, why?

 

[RayCTID]

We shouldn't take Daily Mail seriously

 

[slbsn]

This is going to be a very long post, and no doubt excruciatingly dull for the vast majority of posters on here. Nonetheless, when it's completed, I'll hit reply, having spent a big chunk of my Saturday morning on it, because I think it's helpful to try to clear the issue up when there seem to be differing interpretations of just how serious the charges brought by the PL will be seen to be when the issues behind them are known.

In the post quoted above, the assertions that I've bolded might be correct. Not only don't we know what evidence the PL has in order to substantiate the charges against us, but the PL hasn't even seen fit to provide the slightest detail regarding what the charges relate to.

Nonetheless, I personally consider that the chances of such an analysis proving correct are very slim. Of necessity, for it to be right in the light of what was said (which I quote below) by the CAS Panel in 2020 in the proceedings regarding the charges brought by UEFA against City, the PL's current charges must be completely unrelated to the accusations UEFA made against the club. I don't buy that.

Reports by journalists with extremely close connections to the most influential clubs reportedly pressing the PL to investigate and charge City have indicated that the purpose behind those exhortations has been to attempt to cover once more aspects of the case that UEFA prosecuted incompetently (in the meddlers’ view) before the CAS and to catch matters that might have been time-barred in the CAS proceedings. In the light of this, I think that by far the more reasonable conjecture is that the essence of the charges UEFA brought is replicated in the new charges.

So let's look at the CAS's award dated 13 July 2020 and see what the Panel itself, comprising three highly eminent and extremely experienced practitioners, thought of UEFA's charges.

Para 206 of the Award states as follows: "The Panel is satisfied to accept that the allegations in these proceedings are particularly severe. It not only concerns alleged arrangements between MCFC and ADUG as its main shareholder but also Etihad as one of its principal sponsors, concerning equity funding being disguised as sponsorship contributions over a significant period of time, resulting in an influx of relevant income for monitoring purposes, with the consequence that it could spend significantly more money (more than GBP 200,000,000) than it would have been able to spend without such arrangements."

In para 207 of the Award, the Panel notes that the alleged conduct described in para 206 would constitute dishonest concealment. Importantly, it then goes on to equate such dishonest concealment to corruption, noting that an approach developed in CAS jurisprudence with regard to matters of corruption is: "... not only applicable to cases involving corruption, but also to cases concerning an alleged dishonest concealment of equity funding as sponsorship contributions ...".

Further, looking at the skeletal information so far given by the PL of what the charges involve, it seems extremely difficult to conceive of a situation in which the accusations are true but City's accounts haven't been fabricated in a material way. The charges involve the provision of false financial information over a period of nearly a decade, and the prospect seems negligible that we could have done that but nonetheless have prepared and filed true and accurate accounts throughout that time.

Here, let me quote the opinion of @projectriver, whose knowledge of the legal aspects of City’s regulatory difficulties comfortably exceeds that of any other poster on here and that of any 'expert' I've seen in the media. He's read all the available relevant materials, for a start, which fact on its own seems to put him ahead of almost every other 'expert' commentator in terms of being qualified to deliver opinions.

In case anyone doubts his experience and abilities, I take the liberty of outlining Stefan's credentials in a post that he himself made on Tuesday, 8 February: "[I am] someone who personally led the defence of major false accounting claims in civil proceedings, prosecuted a civil claim for negligence against an auditor and for over 5 years led the (successful) defence of a public company being investigated by the SFO".

As for substantive assessments, Stefan said the following in posts on this forum on Tuesday, 8 February: "It is an ALLEGATION of wholesale false accounting over 9 seasons." Later the same morning, he wrote: "They are, in effect, claiming City deceived the PL, their auditors and multiple other bodies and filed fake accounts and fake financial forecasts. For at least 9 years."

So, assuming we're going over many of the same allegations made by UEFA and played out before the CAS, how should those be characterised? Well, the CAS made a comparison between corruption and the level of dishonesty that would have been involved had such a set of events occurred. And if we look at the criminal law in England and Wales, there's plenty of evidence there, too, as to just how serious these matters are.

The principal piece of legislation relating to criminal liability for fraud and obtaining services dishonestly is the Fraud Act 2006. However, more relevant for our purposes is section 17 of the Theft Act 1968, which relates to the criminal offence of false accounting. After all, where a relevant specific offence exists, it's proper to look at that rather than a similar but more general offence.

Section 17(1)(b) of the 1968 Act provides that a person "shall, on conviction on indictment, be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years" if that person "dishonestly, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another" when he "in furnishing information for any purpose produces or makes use of any account, or any such record or document as aforesaid, which to his knowledge is or may be misleading, false or deceptive in a material particular".

I'm not claiming that City's directors would necessarily face prosecution for this offence even if the PL’s Panel makes an adverse finding against us. When to prosecute for this offence is a complex issue that was debated at some length on here in response to a post of mine back in the context of the CAS proceedings. I don't want to reopen that discussion.

For now, I simply note that I see no reasonable interpretation of the CAS Panel's description of UEFA's accusations that doesn't, on a word-by-word analysis, meet the definition of false accounting under section 17 of the 1968 Act on the part of MCFC's directors. In other words, UEFA implicitly suggested criminality on the part of officers of the club.

The CAS Award backs this up. In para 254, the Panel expressly acknowledges that to find City guilty "would require a conclusion that the evidence of several high-ranking officials of large international commercial enterprises [both inside and outside MCFC] were false and that at least [one, possibly more] would be subject to criminal sanctions". Thus, the thrust of UEFA's allegations is absolutely clear. Until presented with evidence to the contrary, we're entitled to infer that the PL's charges entail similar issues.

It's also worth discussing whether 'fraud' is a loaded term that we should avoid in this context. I submit that it isn't. First, though the body of the criminal offence of fraud under English law entails specific factors listed in the Fraud Act 2006, the term has common currency in standard English. Oxford Languages, publishers of the OED, define fraud as "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain".

I don't believe that, on a message board where most people aren't lawyers, we need to shy away from using words in their standard English meaning when there's also a more narrow or specific legal meaning. And in the standard English meaning, that's exactly what UEFA accused us of (see para 206 of the CAS Award) and what the PL presumably has, too.

But even if we should only use the term 'fraud' if there's a legal ground to do so, one exists by virtue of the Theft Act 1968. If we look at the Table of Contents of the 1968 Act, we see what heading covers the section of the Act in which false accounting falls and remember that the description of that offence is technically a match for the conduct of City's directors had UEFA's allegations been proven as well as presumably for the PL's charges.

The heading in question reads 'Fraud and blackmail'. Well, blackmail plainly isn't relevant here, so we're left with a clear suggestion that fraud is. In other words, we can infer that the 1968 Act, in the form in which it's still in force, regards false accounting as a particular form of fraud.

For all the reasons I've stated, I think it's highly likely that the substance of the PL's allegations against City are as serious as it would be possible for them to be. Furthermore, I regard the use of terms such as 'dishonest concealment', 'false accounting' and 'fraud' in this context to be highly justified. It seems rather fanciful to me to argue that only a few administrative breaches are at play, and at worst we'll receive a slap-on-the-wrist fine, being told to go away and be good boys and girls in future.

The odds, strongly, are that our club's in an existential fight for its future, at least in terms of its ability able to compete at the very top of the English and European game. That doesn't mean we have to slash our wrists and I think there are some grounds for us to be bullish - but that's for another post another time. In the meantime, nor do I think we should doubt the probable severity of the allegations made against us. Deluding ourselves is ultimately unhelpful.

For now, let’s enjoy the rest of Saturday. And let’s hope the players show a bit of the passion Pep did yesterday and take out all of our frustrations on Villa with a good performance and a win tomorrow afternoon.

Good post and thanks for the personal comments.

FWIW I don’t think it matters much what you call it and civil fraud is a misunderstood concept by many people. But as you suggest these are matters that are similar to the those charged by UEFA and you only need to read your extracts or the whole of the CAS judgment to see the type and seriousness of the allegations made there.

But here’s the thing - that makes it far LESS likely they will be proven. It seems to me the PL has overreached and unnecessarily so. So that’s the good news and I suspect, the basis for the club’s confidence.

 

[train man]

Pot, kettle, black from the Daily Sh!t Stirrer...


Daily Mail

Manchester City's rivals claim Pep Guardiola's attack may be libellous​

Story by Matt Hughes For The Daily Mail • Yesterday 22:31

Manchester City’s Premier League rivals reacted angrily on Friday to Pep Guardiola’s outspoken defence of the club’s alleged financial breaches, which many of them consider to be libellous.
Guardiola singled out Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and name-checked eight other clubs he said are lobbying against City, which he claims has pushed the Premier League into issuing more than 100 charges of breaking spending rules.
Guardiola’s outburst came a day after City chief executive Ferran Soriano was seen shaking hands with executives at other clubs at a Premier League meeting in London, a disconnect that has gone down very badly among other members of the top flight.
Several club executives told Sportsmail they strongly deny pushing the Premier League to take action against City, pointing out that the issuing of charges earlier this week followed a four-year investigation in which they played no part.
Levy has received messages of support from other Premier League clubs after Guardiola’s criticism.

And that's nonsense as well, the name-checked clubs were those pushing UEFA, and that's not in doubt as they were named on the complaint letter weren't they? These twats distort everything. Pep did say the other 19 clubs now want us punished by PL, as was widely reported in msm, and that point has been highlighted on these pages.

 

[BobKowalski]

Personally never felt it so toxic as it is now. Been called just about everything you could imagine for basically daring to be a city fan this week and refuse to tow the line about city being obviously guilty. It's absolutely wild. People really need to give their heads a wobble.

There seems to be an almost hysterical fury that City and fans are not rolling over and accepting the narrative that we are guilty. A narrative that has been years in the making. This narrative cannot be failed or seem to fail. Too many clubs, opposition fans and media have invested too much to let that happen.

Pep putting down a marker yesterday and giving the fans someone to rally behind was an important moment. Fans such as yourself arguing our case is also important, especially as you have to remain calm and unemotional in the face of hostility. It can’t be easy and full respect for doing it.

 

[MillionMilesAway]

I think it's clear people have been told to calm down. Question is: by the PL or by City. And if the PL, why?

I'd expect that City have made a request for fair coverage.
Apparently a Sky chat by Guardiola was cancelled this morning.

 

[slbsn]

As you quoted me, I was going to write a long reply, but then I thought no :).

Let me just say this. I just disagree that the annual reports don't give a true and fair view due to any of the issues raised by UEFA, or by the PL if they are the same. For Etihad, for example, there was a valid contract, the services were provided and payment was received in full. It doesn't matter to the true and fair view of the annual accounts how the money got into Etihad in the first place. If ADUG gave the money to Etihad to pay to MCFC, or it came out of central funds, the accounts would show: valid income in revenues, no debtors, and cash in the bank. For the record, UEFA didn't contest the fair value of the contract, or the fact Etihad isn't a related party.

If there was a case to answer for circumventing PL rules around sponsorship and/or equity funding, lawyers may consider that fraud or concealment or whatever, but when Joe Public talks about fraud and misleading auditors, he means falsifying accounts. I doubt very much the annual accounts are false.

I have more nonsense to spout another time and I may be wrong, of course. It has happened before.

The PL won’t succeed in the case you detail above. I’ve long argued as you do above.

That’s not the allegation though - the allegation must be that the contract either doesn’t exist as has been presented or is a fiction and/or those sponsors are related parties but that everyone (PL, UEFA, BDO, UEFAs experts, CAS, various third parties that have carried out DD) has been misled via a concealment of the facts. And that would, obviously, make the accounts false. IF, which must be unlikely, it was proved.

And dishonest concealment is definitely in the mix a) as it was at CAS and b) because otherwise you couldn’t raise causes of action over 6 years ago because the PL DOES have a limitation period - English law.