PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

SSBlue said:
There's one thing I don't understand, and I know the clever bods of Bluemoon will have the answers :)

How is it that the Premier League have FFP rules in the first place?

I assume it needed to be voted for by a majority of PL clubs. And obviously it suits the rags/scousers. But why did all the other clubs vote for it?

Vote for FFP = 4 or 5 "legacy" clubs.
Vote against = 4 or 5 clubs with aspirations to spend money (including City).
So a split vote so far.
For every other club, FFP means more admin, more scrutiny and less chance of ever becoming a top team.

Just seems weird to me.

It'd be interesting to know whether Everton voted for FFP.
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"I'd love to put more of my money into the club for new players, but these pesky FFP rules won't let me"
 
I've said it from the start that the premier league were backed into a corner by the hateful eight or whatever to act on City. They've then shit themselves and come out with this 115 bs figure to appease the yank owned clubs. I honestly believe they've got nothing on us, only my opinion obviously which a lot will find quite naive
 
Chi-town blues said:
more importantly how are rags and dippers getting along with their ffp? How can rags be so self sustainable when most of the world have moved to gluten free and noodles stock has gone down? Anyone keeping tap of their spending and books when they haven’t won any major trophies lately ?
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Utd failed UEFA FFP rules and had to pay a fine, however, the premier league rules allowed clubs to include more Covid related losses than UEFA so they met the premier league ffp threshold.
 
Dribble said:
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. )(

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Great summary.
The Mancini contract issue seems to me to be immaterial in value and pre dates FFP.
If as you say we were sanctioned in 2013 by UEFA for the image rights payment then this information was in the public domain, the PL would have known about it and therefore surely this issue is out of time under UK law?
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
Because the PL are the FFP licensing body for the English clubs. So if we've submitted incorrect accounts, potentially that impacts our UEFA FFP compliance. Though I very much doubt that even the worst case scenario would see us fail either UEFA's or the less stringent PL rules.
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Colin, are we required to put the length of the grass in the accounts? If not, how did they get us on this most serious of charges?
 
Len Rum said:
Great summary.
The Mancini contract issue seems to me to be immaterial in value and pre dates FFP.
If as you say we were sanctioned in 2013 by UEFA for the image rights payment then this information was in the public domain, the PL would have known about it and therefore surely this issue is out of time under UK law?
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So this is the issue. UK Law has a statute of limitations spanning 6 years, however the PL has no statute of limitations.

As I've been saying all day, it seems our case comes down to UK Law vs UEFA/PL rules.

It seems it's this & other instances like the fit & proper person test relating to Ambramovich & Usmanov etc, which have prompted the government to create an Independent Regulator for English Football (IREF).

By the look of things, the PL's shot themselves in the foot introducing FFP the way they have.

乁⁠(⁠ ⁠•⁠_⁠•⁠ ⁠)⁠ㄏ
 
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