I've just listened to the podcast featuring
@Prestwich_Blue saying our charges come down to 4 breaches, & multiples of those to get to the PL's 115 charges.
1. Mancini's Consultancy contract with Al Jazira.
Mancini was paid £1.45m plus bonuses by City, but had a second £1.75m Consultancy contract with Al Jazira Sports & Cultural Club which was owned by ADUG, the parent company of Manchester City.
The Der Spiegel claim is ADUG paid Al Jazira the money which was paid to Mancini as a Consultancy fee to help City get around FFP.
2. Image Rights payments through Fordham Image Rights
In 2013 City sold our players' Image Rights to Fordham Sports Image Rights for £24.5m & they paid our players their image rights.
UEFA & Der Spiegel claim we did this to artificially inflate our income to pass FFP in 2013, which City vehemently denied, but this formed part of the breach for which we were sanctioned that year.
After reaching an agreement with UEFA in 2015, City wound up this arrangement with Fordham & by 2018 we'd brought the players' Image Rights back into club ownership & control.
3. Etisalat Sponsorship
UEFA & Der Spiegel claim that City took two payments of £15m (£30m total) in 2012 & 2013 from Abu Dhabi based Financial Broker Jaber Mohamed, disguising it as sponsorship money from Abu Dhabi based telecommunications company Etisilat.
To my recollection, this was bridge funding from from Jaber Mohamed, because the Etisilat sponsorship payment wasn't due to City until 2015. On the due date, Jaber Mohamed was reimbursed by Etisilat.
4. Non Cooperation
After submitting our interim accounts in March 2013 which UEFA passed, we submitted our certified accounts 4 weeks later, only to learn UEFA had shifted the monitoring period back by 12 months without our knowledge to include the wages of Carlos Tevez.
This meant from being £3m inside FFP, we found ourselves £3m outside the limit & were hammered with a £50m fine, a £50m per season transfer limit for 3 seasons, a CL squad reduction from 24 to 20 players for 3 seasons, & of that 20-man squad, 4 had to be club trained & 4 Association trained.
Conclusion:
UEFA/G14 brought in FFP to stop City ever challenging the hegemony of the European Elite teams.
As they made moves to stop us, we made legal counter-moves to circumnavigate FFP restrictions on our growth.
Legal is the operative word here. What City have done hasn't broken any UK, European or Abu Dhabi laws, BUT UEFA believe they've broken their FFP rules.
The question of right or wrong comes down to whether UEFA's rules usurp the sovereign laws of the UK, Europe & Abu Dhabi. They don't.
This comes to the heart of why City are in favour of an Independent Football Regulator (IFR) with CAS finding in our favour, & UEFA/G14 & the five founding members of the Premier League being Everton, Spuds, Liverpool, Arsenal & ManUre aren't in favour of outside regulation.
UEFA/G14 & those five PL teams are quite happy with English & European football being governed in their own self interests. City realised their FFP rules would make it virtually impossible for any newly minted outsiders to ever challenge them domestically or in European competition, so did what we legally could to progress to where we are today.
Hopefully I've got all this right, as I think it vitally important we sort the wheat from the chaff in defence of the club we love. )(
