PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

I don’t work in papers; maybe as seems to be the case often, he didn’t write the headline for his article. Reading it, he actually says “maybe” we “broke the rules”, and if we did in as widespread a fashion as the number of accusations suggests we should suffer a points deduction or immediate relegation, if they are proved true, but tbh mate, that really isn’t the thrust of what he’s writing about.
For the avoidance of any doubt, he’s writing about Manchester united, about liverpool and about arsenal.
And to be clear he is mainly knocking them :)
 
I've heard about this for years but I don't have the brains to get my head around it. Can someone please explain why Mancini getting paid for a consultancy role by anyone while managing us is illegal? People having multiple jobs, hired by the same people doesn't seem abnormal at all to me. Tax purposes?
I don't undersand this either because those documents show that Mancini's consultancy fee from Al Jazira was terminated in 2012 before the PL FFP rules started operating so how can City have breached those rules. Clearly the arrangement of getting paid for a second job in another country (no matter how spurious) was a way of minimising Mancini's tax burden by spreading the cost but this is tax avoidance not tax evasion so it is legal and normal accounting practice. In fact the correspondence makes it clear that Mancini's agent was pushing for CFG to pay him more to reduce his own tax burden. So the tax bill seems to have been paid. So it's not illegal and doesn't breach FFP. This Mancini stuff is just a red herring.
 
How are you feeling about this Colin? Are you reasonably confident?
As I said, the Mancini stuff is small beer so not worried about that in the slightest. The other accounting stuff may well hinge on how we dealt with image rights payments and whether that was OK. We sold those image rights to Fordham for around £25m back in 2013. We needed that money to (as we thought) avoid FFP sanctions but that was rendered redundant by UEFA moving the goalposts.

But I'm pretty sure UEFA would have known about this at the time they were investigating, as it was part of the Der Spiegel stories that triggered their investigation and charges. You have to wonder why they didn't go after us on that score as it potentially inflated our profits, by reducing our wage costs. Possibly they were advised it wasn't illegal or thevsums involved wouldn't have made a difference to our FFP results. It was also happening up to 2018, so well within any limitation period, should one be imposed by the courts or independent commission.

Assuming we had good legal and accounting advice before doing that, and our auditors were aware of it and weren't unhappy, then there's a decent chance that we'll be OK. If we weren't on firm ground with that, if we deceived the auditors and UEFA, then we've got problems.
 
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Something I would love to know is if we did all these things, is the overall amount spent over that time, more or less then United.

If it’s not it would be great for that to be communicated and try and change perception.

Fuck knows if it’s true, I likened it today that it’s like a running race and one kid has these expensive running spikes his Dad brought for him that allow you to run faster, whereas others had trainers.

One kids Dad couldn’t afford the expensive running spikes and his trainers where old and slowed him down.

Every time he raced the other kid, that kid won. One day a rich uncle came along and brought the kid the same running spikes as the other kid.

They raced and this time the kid won. The other kid who was used to winning got really upset and complained it was unfair.

He felt as this kids Dad could not buy the spikes and instead his uncle did this was uneven, as he didn’t have a rich uncle.

So the question is what’s unfair that one kid did not have a rich uncle, or is it fair that they both have the same advantages to see who really was the fastest.

Possibly not my best way of telling it, but shut the red parents up on the U10’s team.
I had a similar analogy but with a bike.

The one thing I added was would it not just be fair if both could only spend £100 to improve their bike each year? Basically like pretty much every other team sport on the planet.
 

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