PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

Bellamy's Caddy said:
I suspect we will get some sort of punishment. It's a kangaroo court and as you say the PL will want to save face. But let's face it, the damage of these allegations alone has been enough to justify them bringing the charges. The media and vast majority of neutrals believe, or are happy to accept that we cheated. Even when CAS overturned our ban, it was apparently because we had better lawyers, as if UEFA had a couple of work experience lads representing them. Mud sticks and they've done their job. I dont really care what punishment they come up with, we won our titles on the pitch and that's irrefutable.
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We're vulnerable on non-cooperation.. maybe not so much on the others.
 
Dirty Harry said:
For what it’s worth mate, yours and the other ‘legal’ lads who post I just see it as you erring on the side of caution and maybe even helping to manage our expectations from your own knowledge and experience, and it’s really appreciated the lengths you all go to, whether we agree/understand, or not.
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I don't claim to speak for the others, but from my point of view the temptation to try to dampen expectations is always strong. Most people on here understand that, in a football match, the objectively stronger of the two teams sometimes doesn't win and the better of the teams in any given match can also lose. But they expect law to be an exact science when it also isn't and can often go either way (albeit for different reasons).

Issues that look black and white to a layman can often be very much subject to wildly differing interpretations when outstanding legal minds get to grips with them, and this is what I try to convey. I remember Stefan posting on here before the CAS proceedings that, in any litigation, there's a risk of 30% that you'll lose even if you think your case is iron-clad.

Now, when I was a UK government lawyer back in the day, we had a case that we considered pretty much a cert and our QC (as his title then was) put our chances at 80%. That still meant we were a 1-in-5 shot to lose even when we thought we had a slam-dunk. (We did win in the end, by the way.) But the percentages are immaterial. The key point is that, even where your case seems really strong, you never know for sure how it'll go.

I was asked yesterday what would happen where, in effect, the evidence were exactly the same as before the CAS on the substantive point considered in the latter forum and we appealed an adverse decision of the PL panel on the ground that it was so perverse that it must demonstrate a failure of the panel to act in accordance with its statutory duty. My view is that such an argument would be have significant merit.

Unfortunately I can't even begin to try and guarantee that the High Court would agree. That's the difficulty in posting on legal issues here when there's an understandable desire from other posters for certainty that doesn't really exist.
 
waspish said:
None compliance we will be done for and that will tick the box of we have loads to hide and we as guilty as hell just like the cas case..
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I've thought that from the start but to be honest I'm starting to think we're going to be free and clear. Nothing to base it on but a gut feeling supported by snippets on here.
 
petrusha said:
I don't claim to speak for the others, but from my point of view the temptation to try to dampen expectations is always strong. Most people on here understand that, in a football match, the objectively stronger of the two teams sometimes doesn't win and the better of the teams in any given match can also lose. But they expect law to be an exact science when it also isn't and can often go either way (albeit for different reasons).

Issues that look black and white to a layman can often be very much subject to wildly differing interpretations when outstanding legal minds get to grips with them, and this is what I try to convey. I remember Stefan posting on here before the CAS proceedings that, in any litigation, there's a risk of 30% that you'll lose even if you think your case is iron-clad.

Now, when I was a UK government lawyer back in the day, we had a case that we considered pretty much a cert and our QC (as his title then was) put our chances at 80%. That still meant we were a 1-in-5 shot to lose even when we thought we had a slam-dunk. (We did win in the end, by the way.) But the percentages are immaterial. The key point is that, even where your case seems really strong, you never know for sure how it'll go.

I was asked yesterday what would happen where, in effect, the evidence were exactly the same as before the CAS on the substantive point considered in the latter forum and we appealed an adverse decision of the PL panel on the ground that it was so perverse that it must demonstrate a failure of the panel to act in accordance with its statutory duty. My view is that such an argument would be have significant merit.

Unfortunately I can't even begin to try and guarantee that the High Court would agree. That's the difficulty in posting on legal issues here when there's an understandable desire from other posters for certainty that doesn't really exist.
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I get what you say regarding the appeals process or lack of it in an independent court.
I don’t know if you or anyone else knows, but my concern always centres around what level of burden of proof are we talking about in a PL hearing.
This is not a criminal court where the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, which although is not necessarily a mathematical certainty, it is pretty damn high.
It’s the kind of certainty that a juror would have to have of guilt, if it was his own family member in the dock.

If the tribunal uses civil court balance of probabilities odds, I would not be overly confident of not being stitched up.

@petrusha do you know what method the PL panel will employ?
Is it written somewhere in the PL regulations?
 
petrusha said:
Obviously, I'm not going to leave this without some kind of response. What I'd say is that, when discussing legal issues, words matter and there may well be reasons why lawyers choose the formulations they do.

I've quoted at length the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1996, which is the only basis under which aspects of this arbitration procedure can end up being litigated in the courts of the land. In the light of that, I find idiotic and comical one poster's assertion yesterday that the discussion on recourse to the courts that had developed throughout the day could be based on "simply bad information". My comments were based on, and quoted freely from, the Act of Parliament that's relevant to the situation, which is as sound a source of information as could be cited.

The Arbitration Act 1996 was conceived and drafted, and now operates, to enshrine the principle that parties who've agreed to arbitrate any dispute that arises between them (as City and the PL in effect have) should receive an outcome determined by that arbitration process. The general legal position is that they shouldn't then get a second chance to go to court, when they've already agreed with one another to exclude that method of resolving disputes. Only in rare and exceptional circumstances does the Act allow a departure from that principle.

This is simply a matter of fact and I disagree that a better way to explain the right to appeal would be to say that there IS a right of appeal in certain, unlikely circumstances. The difference is certainly nuanced but nonetheless IMO significant and the way I've described it deliberately reflects the way that a court would approach the issue. People may want reassurance in this situation but they if they expect me to frame things in a way I'm unhappy with just to make others on this board feel better, then they're going to be disappointed.

Ironically, I started out in the discussion yesterday thinking that I was providing reassurance in that posters were saying that the final PL ruling could blatantly shaft us and we had no chance of an appeal to the courts. I think in certain circumstances we could have, and I hoped that might provide a degree of comfort to posters by saying so. But it's extremely difficult to prevail in those circumstances and I'd be doing no one any favours by failing to stress that.

In addition, I'm cautious because I've been posting on City message boards since discovering the original Blue View back in 1996, half a lifetime ago, and have long since discovered that a small proportion (but a surprisingly large number in absolute terms) of internet users are utter cunts. I've received unwarranted personal abuse in the past when people have claimed that postings crafted in the most optimistic way possible misled them despite my including all necessary caveats. I prefer not to have this happen again if I can avoid it.

Now, as it happens, I'm relatively sanguine about our prospects based solely on the little information that's so far in the public domain. As I've already said more than once, I think that the provisions of the Arbitration Act 1996 do afford us sufficient rights to keep a PL panel relatively honest given that they know that we'll be making every possible use of each opportunity to go to the High Court that any errors or bias on their own part may allow us.

If people want other grounds for optimism, they can find them in the discussions of a need for a particularly "cogent" standard of evidence given the nature of the allegations and of a need for the PL to prove fraud or concealment so that the general limitation period stipulated by the Limitation Act 1980 wouldn't apply. There's been considerable discussion of these points further back in this thread. I appreciate that non-lawyers may not remember the salient reasoning, but the search function should enable anyone who's interested to find the relevant posts.

However, ultimately we know very little about the charges against us. The whole process is so far being conducted in such a way that it's easy for hostile media outlets and venal commercial rivals to smear us without the club being able to defend itself in the court of public opinion or City fans being able to reassure ourselves as to the prospects for the overall proceedings. I don't see we have any real alternative but to suck that up, unfortunately.
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your input is clearly appreciated by all of us.
 
Surely every club in the Premier League should get scrutinised in the same way we have?
Or maybe we should just get American owners then maybe we'll get left alone, be allowed to run the club at a loss and be allowed to choose a club with Middle Eastern owners to harass, casual racially abuse and generally take the piss out of via the Premier League.
 
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