PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

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Chris in London said:
Just to take the Mancini issue, it’s even more complicated than that. It’s already in the public domain that Mancini had a contract with Al Jazirah to do a certain amount of coaching For which he would be paid a certain amount of money. A contract, as you know, is a legally binding agreement that one party will do X and the other party will do Y. So City’s defence to that particular charge should be as simple as pointing to the contract and then saying “there you go, he was employed by AJ, not us.”

Which is almost certainly exactly what did happen during the 4 year PL investigation. But the PL is nonetheless alleging that payments apparently made pursuant to a legally binding agreement between RM and AJ were actually made by us. And we then concealed that arrangement in our accounts.

This inherently involves an allegation that the AJ contract was a sham. It is no small thing to allege that a contract is a sham. It is an allegation of dishonesty, one that has to be made against not only MCFC but also RM and AJ too. It is an allegation that requires a substantial weight of evidence before it can be made out.

So the PL charge is based on what evidence exactly? Absolutely nothing that is in the public domain at least. I stress I know no more about the facts of all this than everyone else, based on what is already in the public domain. What I do know is that on this issue the PL has got an absolute mountain to climb in legal terms and they appear not to have a scrap of evidence to help them on their way.
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Its incredible but you can’t underestimate how stupid Richard Masters is.
 
Winchester said:
can I just ask?
Have we anything to fear??
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The only thing that worries me is the fact both the Glazers and FSG have taken their history clubs of the market - I think they wanted to sell because they couldn’t compete with us and perhaps they have been made aware that we will be sanctioned
 
Winchester said:
can I just ask?
Have we anything to fear??
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The only thing we have to fear is if the panel give in to the pressure of public opinion and the redshirts. On the known evidence, I don’t think there is too much to worry about, maybe some minor technical breeches.
 
Gorton_Tubster said:
How do you know? I mean it makes sense, but what do you know?
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There will be no finding that impedes our progress imho. Most likely a fine for some non-disclosure / non-cooperation, imo.

Can I be sure? No, but I can't see them proving the actually serious charges in a million years. So that just leaves a bit of bullshit that everyone gets up to if you can only identify it by getting access to the records.
 
birchwoodgingerste said:
I know that there's no evidence to get us sanctioned and as mentioned many times this will take years not months.fsg and glaziers have taken the clubs of the market because it makes zero sense to sell when the stocks are low.
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Yeah I sort of asked how do you know... nvm. I thought you knew something we dont.
 
Disco Danger said:
The only thing that worries me is the fact both the Glazers and FSG have taken their history clubs of the market - I think they wanted to sell because they couldn’t compete with us and perhaps they have been made aware that we will be sanctioned
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Total bollocks, they took them off the market because they couldn't sell them for the money they wanted. United have got the Glazers infighting to contend with as well as some want to sell, others don't.
 
WRicko said:
A few videos about FFP have mention extra separate off the books contracts for players but I have only ever seen that mentioned with Mancini as far as I can remember and I don’t remember it being mentioned in the email or at CAS so where has that allegation come from ?
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UEFA knew about that in 2015 and talked to City about it. It was about payment of image rights. These are paid differently to their normal Schedule E salary, which is subject to PAYE and NI at source. Image rights are paid under Schedule D, where the recipient is responsible for any applicable tax and NI.

Fordham (the company who paid the image rights) was set up in 2013 so therefore it's a reasonable supposition that UEFA saw something in our FFP return around 2014 or 2015 that related to this. Maybe they saw the new company involved, or they saw that image rights had 'disappeared' from player remuneration. Whatever, they discussed it with us and no disciplinary action was taken by them. The arrangement seems to have ended in 2018.

We don't know the exact circumstances as yet but let's speculate that the image rights payments hadn't been reported to UEFA in 2014. That would be pretty serious I'd say, and having been sanctioned once, you'd expect UEFA to act pretty firmly. Yet they didn't. It could be that had we included them, it would have made no difference anyway. It could be that, under the letter of the law, we had a valid argument for making the payments the way we did (although it may not have been in the spirit of the law).

But whatever the background, UEFA discussed it with us AND TOOK NO FORMAL DISCIPLINARY ACTION. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume that there was nothing actionable.

In 2018, when the Der Spiegel allegations were made public, UEFA charged us over the Etihad sponsorship but still took no formal disciplinary action over Fordham, even though it was within the allowable time period. Given that UEFA's FFP rules are far tighter than the PL's, it's hard to see how the PL can land this. That's why I've said that the PL charges are UEFA's "sloppy seconds" as it's stuff UEFA knew about in 2015 and 2018 but still didn't charge us with.
 
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Prestwich_Blue said:
UEFA knew about that in 2015 and talked to City about it. It was about payment of image rights. These are paid differently to their normal Schedule E salary, which is subject to PAYE and NI at source. Image rights are paid under Schedule D, where the recipient is responsible for any applicable tax and NI.

Fordham (the company who paid the image rights) was set up in 2013 so therefore it's a reasonable supposition that UEFA saw something in our FFP return around 2014 or 2015 that related to this. Maybe they saw the new company involved, or they saw that image rights had 'disappeared' from player remuneration. Whatever, they discupassed it with us and no disciplinary action was taken by them. The arrangement seems to have ended in 2018.

We don't know the exact circumstances as yet but let's speculate that the image rights payments hadn't been reported to UEFA in 2014. That would be pretty serious I'd say, and having been sanctioned once, you'd expect UEFA to act pretty firmly. Yet they didn't. It could be that had we included them, it would have made no difference anyway. It could be that, under the letter of the law, we had a valid argument for making the payments the way we did (although it may not have been in the spirit of the law).

But whatever the background, UEFA discussed it with us AND TOOK NO FORMAL DISCIPLINARY ACTION. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume that there was nothing actionable.

In 2018, when the Der Spiegel allegations were made public, UEFA charged us over the Etihad sponsorship but still took no formal disciplinary action over Fordham, even though it was within the allowable time period. Given that UEFA's FFP rules are far tighter than the PL's, it's hard to see how the PL can land this. That's why I've said that the PL charges are UEFA's "sloppy seconds" as it's stuff UEFA knew about in 2015 and 2018 but still didn't charge us with.
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Good summary.

There have been a few rumblings around Yaya Toure's remuneration, PB. You think this is just the Frodham issue dumbed down for the press, or something new?
 
Chris in London said:
Just to take the Mancini issue, it’s even more complicated than that. It’s already in the public domain that Mancini had a contract with Al Jazirah to do a certain amount of coaching For which he would be paid a certain amount of money. A contract, as you know, is a legally binding agreement that one party will do X and the other party will do Y. So City’s defence to that particular charge should be as simple as pointing to the contract and then saying “there you go, he was employed by AJ, not us.”

Which is almost certainly exactly what did happen during the 4 year PL investigation. But the PL is nonetheless alleging that payments apparently made pursuant to a legally binding agreement between RM and AJ were actually made by us. And we then concealed that arrangement in our accounts.

This inherently involves an allegation that the AJ contract was a sham. It is no small thing to allege that a contract is a sham. It is an allegation of dishonesty, one that has to be made against not only MCFC but also RM and AJ too. It is an allegation that requires a substantial weight of evidence before it can be made out.

So the PL charge is based on what evidence exactly? Absolutely nothing that is in the public domain at least. I stress I know no more about the facts of all this than everyone else, based on what is already in the public domain. What I do know is that on this issue the PL has got an absolute mountain to climb in legal terms and they appear not to have a scrap of evidence to help them on their way.
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How can city or the PL prove or disprove anything when it relates to a club that is nothing to do with city in a different jurisdiction which doesn’t have to do anything for city or the PL and. Manager who again is in a different jurisdiction who doesn’t have to do anything for city or the PL it should be dismissed within about 30 seconds unless of course City want to 100% clear there name and can persuade these people who give evidence and testimony
 
The Fordam think makes perfect sense in the business world but looks dodgy to the press and more complex than normal football the only thing that worries me a little about it is Fordam doesn’t seem to have done very well out of so kind looks like a sham. However maybe it was a bit like Barcelonas leavers maybe we sold the rights to pass FFP and agreed to buy them back at a later date with profit on top

Where has the Yaya thing come from ?
 
Carnt believe all this is still going on after the summer we had selling youth and all the stuff going on with other clubs but only getting small fines and little details given
 
WRicko said:
The Fordam think makes perfect sense in the business world but looks dodgy to the press and more complex than normal football the only thing that worries me a little about it is Fordam doesn’t seem to have done very well out of so kind looks like a sham. However maybe it was a bit like Barcelonas leavers maybe we sold the rights to pass FFP and agreed to buy them back at a later date with profit on top

Where has the Yaya thing come from ?
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It was exactly like a Barcelona lever. Iirc we sold some intangible assets to CFG at the same time and the two lots of sales proceeds should have been enough for us to pass FFP, but they moved the goalposts after we submitted the information.

The Yaya Toure stuff was in the press at the time, but I am thinking it was just part of the Fordham deal but the press are too stupid to understand it so couch it in "shady dealing" terms. As PB says, though, we don't know.
 
WRicko said:
Carnt believe all this is still going on after the summer we had selling youth and all the stuff going on with other clubs but only getting small fines and little details given
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theirs were only minor discretions but nobody care to ask how many breaches just swept under carpet
 
dadnlad said:
theirs were only minor discretions but nobody care to ask how many breaches just swept under carpet
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I don’t understand how it can be called minor breaches when I don’t even think we know how big the losses are at Everton and United once allowable are factored in. I would argue that these losses are worse than when we got done first time football should all be use to FFP by now UEFA moved the goal posts. They will argue Covid. There seems to be an assumption that the losses are only minor but given the sums involved with players wages the costs of buying even average players it would be very hard to only break FFP a little bit. As we found out we thought we was ok first time round UEFA moves the goals posts we lost a bucket that was all technical stuff you would think would result in loss on a far smaller scale than wasting money on Sancho for example or missing out on champions league etc

Chelsea are a different issue
 
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