PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[Bald fraud]

If found guilty what will this mean for the sheik, and everyone associated with City, the embarrassment to Abu-Dhabi all the money invested into different projects in this Country.

Have you ever lost a fiver?

 

[bobbyowenquiff]

Congrats on that but it also frustrates the life out of me. The level of interest and positive comments just goes to show that TS have a platform whereby they don’t need this good cop/bad cop routine. They can and should be using the platform to have informed people on there to drive real discussion. Instead we have 350+ days a year of inane rambling from people who think they know what they’re talking about but clearly don’t have a clue.

Even after yesterdays excellent, informative piece from you, the fallout was “finance expert says City will be relegated” and today we are back to Simon largely ignoring everything from yesterday and it’s “I believe they have a case to answer” and “the people I speak to”, almost as if he didn’t have a discussion with an expert yesterday, who told him exactly how it is.

It’s as if TS have decided that their own audience is too thick to understand real discussion. They may be right.

When Jordan says the people he speaks to he means his new pal Rick Parry. I prefer to call him Rick Poison.

 

[StillBluessinceHydeRoad]

It's my pleasure.

That's an interesting point about the position taken by the PL's independent commission, and got me thinking. The PL's PSR are more generic than the FFP ones, which are quite specific.

FFP goes into detail about owner investment, about allowable expenditure and other things. The PL Handbook only talks about submitting accounts, and the process for doing that, acting in good faith, and generic requirements like that. The only area they go into specific detail on is associated party transactions.

So the commission won't have any empirical yardstick to judge our charges against. They could, for example, say that the Etisalat sponsorship (where ADUG seemingly paid upfront before being reimbursed) was not done in good faith. They could take the same view of the Mancini contract, or the players' image rights payments. That's potentially a very different test to the PSR or FFP financial calculations, or CAS declaring that there was no evidence of disguised owner investment within the Etihad contract.

CAS essentially asked:

• Did Etihad pay what was in the contract?
• Was any of that sponsorship funded by Sheikh Mansour?
• If not, how was the additional money due funded?
• Did Etihad pay a fair market price?
• Did City provide adequate exposure for Etihad as part of that contract?

They were happy that there was an acceptable answer for all those questions.

Asking "Did City act in good faith?" is more subjective. Having said that, I'm sure we'll be bringing the CAS output as part of our evidence, and I think they'd be foolish to ignore it.

Just what I wanted to know. Thanks very much for a very full and considered reply. I conclude that any interpretation by the PL which lays us open to penalties would be controversial enough (in our eyes perverse enough!) to provide grounds for appeal.

 

[Stoned Rose]

The one thing that struck me after watching it last night was how much positivity you have created on here with your appearance on the show.
A lone voice, talking sense about the situation was so refreshing for most of us on here after days, weeks, months and years of gutter press bile and hatred being fired at the club.
I slept like a log last night pal.
Thanks for that

Just goes to show the absolute power of the media / press.

 

[pirate]

View attachment 104406

thats harsh on sheila reid

 

[foggy1974]

The problem with speculation about potential punishment is that there is nothing in the PL Handbook about the scale or severity of sanctions. UEFA published a clear tariff of penalties for failing FFP, dependent on the seriousness of the breach and whether it was a first or repeat offenc, so we can safely talk about the scale of any punishment in that situation. Everton may try to use that as part of their appeal.

But the PL doesn't, so in my opinion it's unhelpful to speculate, using words like 'relegation'. And, being pedantic, the PL can't relegate us, as they don't control the lower leagues. As with Bury and the EFL, they could potentially expel us and we'd have to apply to the EFL.

I know it's easy to be wise when you're not the one in front of the camera or microphone but I think my answer to the "What will happen if they're found guilty" question would have been something like "We just don't know. It will totally depend on whether we're found to have breached any of the specified rules in any of the specified years. There are no indicators as to potential sanctions in the PL's rules but, at the very, very worst, there's the possibility we could be expelled from the PL. But that would involve quite an egregious breach of those rules and I don't see that scenario as a likely outcome. Even in (in my view) the unlikely event that we are found to have committed a minor breach, the punishment should be proportionate".

And Talkshites headline would be City face expulsion

 

[JASR]

“No one cares about City” : )

That’s a very good point.

It’s smashed the TS record for video/audio re-watches iirc.

Surely the tipping point of coverage has been reached, and any media organisation that doesn’t go ‘I think we need to change our target metrics’ is just going to be onto an ever dwindling audience if they continue the negative/no reporting bias.

 

[JASR]

Even my wife likes me today.

To quote in finest BM tradition

‘You know the rules…’

 

[foggy1974]

That’s a very good point.

It’s smashed the TS record for video/audio re-watches iirc.

Surely the tipping point of coverage has been reached, and any media organisation that doesn’t go ‘I think we need to change our target metrics’ is just going to be onto an ever dwindling audience if they continue the negative/no reporting bias.

How many people would have clicked on the video had it not had the negative headline, I expect it would be a lot less

 

[JewelZee]

Working on the assumption that City will be cleared and that the charges brought against City by the PL were based on suppositions rather than facts I wonder how many City fans will have suffered from mental health issues e.g. anxiety/depression, caused by the 115 charges. If the facts suggest that this was purely a witch hunt and an attempt to derail City, perhaps the PL will have a legal fight of a different nature from City's fans in the form of a class action.

I've thought about this quite a bit. The utter disregard for the mental health of some supporters caused by a relentless public display of slander and hatred in the media towards an entity that they genuinely love and have so much emotion invested in. It's like having a family member being slagged in the media all day every day with no actual event having been settled or proven. It's preposterous that they can get away with this unceasing policy of slander and IMO it's not a stretch to say that it's causing personal damage to some and that those doing this should be held accountable...