Just going back to the Mancini contract. Many of us - me included - have said that it makes no sense to do what we've been accused of and pay him off the books to make our figures look better as we were posting eye-watering losses at the time anyway, not to mention that the "arrangement" commenced before FFP was even a thing, so a couple of million extra a year on our books wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference.
Anyway, I've been thinking about it over the past couple of days and while my above stance hasn't changed one explanation I have considered is that it wasn't done for our own benefit with the intention to deliberately mislead the PL (as there was no need to) and instead it was done to suit Mancini as perhaps he didn't want to pay full UK tax. I'm presuming the income tax rate for his Al Jazira job was lower than it was for his City role? So give him 2 jobs - one in the UK and one in the UAE and split his wages between the two perhaps? Surely this is only really a matter for HMRC and even then I would guess it comes under tax avoidance rather than tax evasion, but even then would they really want to go there if Mancini confirms that he fulfilled his role with Al Jazira? Seriously, I don't think HMRC would even be interested, so it stands to reason as to why the PL should be. Whatever's gone on, it's fuck-all in the grand scheme of things and certainly not worthy of a points deduction/relegation/liquidation.
A side issue to this is that his initial wage at City was quite low and we're being called out for that, yet ironically it's normally the opposite as we're forever getting accused of over-paying players!
