I can forgive people when we you consider that we are in trouble due to a Portuguese Cyber hacker who gave the material to a German tabloid who spliced emails to make them look dodgy.
I’ve not heard anything as mad as that.
I continually remember that our sponsorship was accepted by UEFA as being of a fair value, under the relevant services to Etihad under the contract had unquestionably been provided, and Etihad had paid for the services in full, with the money coming direct from Etihad. And yet UEFA thought this conduct deserved a two-year ban from their competitions coupled with a fine of tens of millions of Euro.
I still think that such a penalty was clearly disproportionate even if UEFA had managed to prove that somehow equity funding was being injected under the above model. After all, the scheme, had it existed, would have entailed City gifting to Etihad for £8 million sponsorship services worth, according to UEFA's independent expert appraiser, many times that figure at the same time as denying the club itself an opportunity to seek a sponsor that the club wouldn't have to subsidise in this way.
Thus, the alleged scheme wouldn't have involved City illegitimately raising our income by funnelling into the club extra sponsorship funds beyond the fair value we could expect from a third-party sponsor. IMO, that's a salient point, to which UEFA paid no heed in determining the penalty. And a succession of lamebrained cunts acting in the utmost bad faith (I'm looking at you, Simon Jordan, among others) still claim that we did this despite the outcome of the UEFA case.
BUT. There's been a lot of comment on here that the PL are looking to cover matters not litigated at the CAS in the UEFA proceedings, and that's clearly true. However, the PL also seem to be litigating matters that were covered in those proceedings. I suppose there are motives for them to do that if they don't have any more serious evidence than UEFA had, but it would seem a strange course of action to me if they really don't.
