PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

Brightwell Bros. said:
I dunno how old your daughter is, but I'm finding the idea of children being like "your football team has been accused of serious financial malpractice by disguising payments to players through external image rights consultancies and hiding these in audits" very funny. Being a football fan on the playground has changed since I was a kid!
Click to expand...
Top Trumps: Net Spend Edition
 
Big Dave Watson said:
Just want to throw this one out there.

Over the past few days I have read numerous posts saying “I couldn’t sleep last night…..” etc so just wondering if ‘when’ City are exonerated could fans go after the Premier League for causing unecessary personal stress and anxiety?

Just curious, can any legal experts out there answer this?
Click to expand...
Haha, you are a legend BDW, every time I see your posts (usually telling us why we have no chance of getting whichever player we want) I honestly have no idea if you are serious or taking the piss.
 
danielwood5 said:
It's because laws and financial fraud are very different things to the Premier League's self created rules regarding participation in their competitions.
Looking at the charges we've been accused of the first one looks like it's regarding Mancini's time with us and the fact that he was employed by Al Jazira at the same time. As both clubs are owned by Sheikh Mansour the PL are probably saying that his pay for his Al Jazira work was actually a disguised payment for his work with City, therefore, when we told then Mancini was getting paid 'x' amount it was actually 'x + Al Jazira pay'. As long as the Al Jazira accounts show he was being paid by them and all the relevant tax or whatever was being paid then it is of absolutely zero interest to HMRC, the police or anyone else. It could however break the PL rules if they decide that it was a way of paying Mancini more than we declared, this then leads to the accusations of 'true and fair accounts' which in turn affects FFP figures. This is a PL issue rather than a fraud issue.
It will probably be the same with the player payments things, the PL will disagree with some of the figures there which breaks their reporting rules but as long as the money was reported correctly to the various countries involved then they don't care.
With the player salaries stuff it could be something as simple as Coka-Cola paid £1m to the image rights agency for an advert using NYCFC players to be put on the NY subway system. The image rights company said to them if you pay £1.1m we'll let you put De Bruyne's image on there too. This is all perfectly fine and legal and is one of the benefits of selling image rights as part of the CFG rather than as individual clubs, we can negotiate better deals for the clubs and the players involved. We then say that the payment to De Bruyne isn't part of his City wages as he was appearing in an advert for NYCFC rather than MCFC so it wasn't in the Premier League financial statement. They say that's a disguised payment as he plays for MCFC even though the work was to promote NYCFC, the PL says that breaks their rules, we say it didn't. Again, as long as all the money has been declared to the various tax officials of the countries involved it's not a legal problem but it could be a Premier League problem.
These are just examples BTW, I'm just guessing at what the actual issues are but I think it will be petty stuff like this that this whole thing is about. I just wanted to show how there's a huge difference between serious legal breaches and things the Premier League may be fussy about.
Click to expand...
We’ll said Daniel. Best effort I’ve seen by anyone to outline the distinction between actual criminal/Fraudulent activity and petty PL spending policies
 
Don Karleone said:



I like how wages are even brought up with our lawyers as well.
Click to expand...

This is just ridiculous now

The governing body of your sport throws accusations at you and the cost of hiring the quality of lawyer needed to have a fight in the game is held up as further evidence of your wrong doing. You must be guilty because you need an expensive lawyer

preposterous
 
SkyBlueFlux said:
It looks like they’ve used the current season’s PL handbook as in there E.11 is about reporting of financial information. In fact, that must be the case because they’ve referred us for the same breach every season even though the references in the handbook have changed over time.

I’m not sure how this stuff works but surely they have to indicate each breach of the ruleset that was in place at the time of the breach? The wording may have changed since then… we can’t breach rule E.11 of the 2023 handbook in 2012 unless they’re claiming we could bend the 4th dimension to know what the rule would be ten years hence.

It seems quite obvious that this is some kind of administrative error unless I just don’t understand the process. That being said I’m guessing it won’t change anything other than making them look incompetent.
Click to expand...
I had a speeding ticket from a police officer in a car. It was at 16 24 pm. On my handwritten ticket it said 15 24. I was speeding but not proceeded with . My defence was I was in work at the time and if the officer could make a mistake with his timing ,possibly he could also make a mistake with his calculation of speed. Not fined.
 
HolisticJim said:
Part of me would like the. Club to say 'you know, deduct all our points for this season and give us a transfer ban now, plus a fine and we will just get on with life' rather than have it dragged out for years.

We will never clear our name now anyway and so we may as well just take the pain and crack on.
Click to expand...
Wouldn’t like to be in the trenches with you jimmy ffs
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
✖
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.