PL Governance is a crock of shit.Good god, are we back to the "will there be a criminal trial if found guilty..." nonsense? Can anyone recall how long the last one lasted so I can plan to come back when it's over? What came next last time? I've forgotten where we are on the Groundhog day merry-go-round.
PL Governance is a crock of shit.
Close thread. Await verdict.
Start next 1,000 pages of Yah Boo, Told You So.
The PL like UEFA can find City guilty and punish without evidence, In the second UEFA case City did something clever, they forced CAS to only look at the evidence, hence the only charge proved had no evidence. They have done something similar with the PL panel. The investigators tying all the charges together with the bit that has no evidence, ( non cooperation ).Good god, are we back to the "will there be a criminal trial if found guilty..." nonsense? Can anyone recall how long the last one lasted so I can plan to come back when it's over? What came next last time? I've forgotten where we are on the Groundhog day merry-go-round.
Oxymorons the lot of them.PL governance is one of those contradictions in terms. Like local United fans or government intelligence.
I've never bought this apocalyptic view that Stefan and others have taken. Had we made deliberate attempts to conceal or over-inflate income we had received, or knowingly misstated costs we'd incurred in order to show a false financial position, then there might well be an issue. But we haven't.Good god, are we back to the "will there be a criminal trial if found guilty..." nonsense? Can anyone recall how long the last one lasted so I can plan to come back when it's over? What came next last time? I've forgotten where we are on the Groundhog day merry-go-round.
Shouldn’t that read Gordon? :)Oxymorons the lot of them.
The PL like UEFA can find City guilty and punish without evidence, In the second UEFA case City did something clever, they forced CAS to only look at the evidence, hence the only charge proved had no evidence. They have done something similar with the PL panel. The investigators tying all the charges together with the bit that has no evidence, ( non cooperation ).
So it is possible the PL finds us guilty, and it is highly likely that City would take this all the way to Crown Court, at a guess i would say 2 to 3 more years of this, Halfcenturyup post was excellent because it has a good chance of happening, and was very informative:)
I've never bought this apocalyptic view that Stefan and others have taken. Had we made deliberate attempts to conceal or over-inflate income we had received, or knowingly misstated costs we'd incurred in order to show a false financial position, then there might well be an issue. But we haven't.
We've been accused of over-stating the Etihad & Etisalat sponsorships on the grounds that the former only provided a small part of the rated sponsorship, and the latter was paid by ADUG. But CAS put all that to bed comprehensively and unless the PL has incontrovertible evidence that wasn't available to CAS then there clearly been no fraud. And that's the biggest one financially. Had we only received £10m from Etihad but declared it as £60m, with a £50m debt to make up the difference, with that never being paid to us, then that could well be seen as fraudulent. But we correctly declared all revenue we received from Etihad and CAS established that this wasn't disguised owner investment.
Mancini's Al Jazira contract was fairly minuscule in comparison to other costs, at a time when we were reporting huge losses. So that is hardly an attempt to conduct a major fraud.
The image rights stuff was actually an attempt to boost revenue by selling IP to what was probably not a truly independent third party. It wasn't about keeping costs off the books but getting income on the books to try to avoid FFP penalties. UEFA were aware of this well before 2018, yet no action was taken, other than an agreement to end the scheme. Had it been considered fraudulent, then the PL (the licensor) would almost certainly have been informed and action taken. It's entirely possible that as that licensor, the PL were involved anyway. Yet nothing came of it.
For those reasons I highly doubt that any criminal action would follow even in the unlikey event we were found in breach of all three charges.
Thanks for reminding me that I meant to say much the same thing. The image rights sale to Fordham was a case of selling something we owned to someone else, who we might have some sort of association with. Very much the same as Chelsea have done, or have tried to do.On the image rights stuff, it is miniscule compared to the financial shenanigans Chelsea have been getting up to recently, and also the clubs selling academy players to each other, in order to gain cashflow advantage. These things are loopholes. There's nothing wrong with exploiting them before they are closed.