I'd note that the most serious of the 'charges', which are the ones relating to the inflation of sponsorships, are worded so that the accusations specifically refer to the club acting in bad faith. That in effect means that we deliberately undertook wrongful actions in full knowledge of what we were doing.
And then there's the fact that certain of the other matters are prima facie time-barred under the Limitation Act 1980 (Mancini's contract, image rights payments and possibly the Etihad and Aabar sponsorships). The only way those matters aren't time-barred is if the PL can prove fraud and/or deliberate concealment.
Make no mistake, this is emphatically NOT just a matter of "interpretation of detail". We're being accused of systematically producing false accounts for a period of almost a decade to disguise the true nature of payments that were to the club's benefit but allegedly contravened the rules.
Given the nature of the allegations we face, it's not remotely credible or conceivable that City's execs could possibly have been acting in the manner they purportedly were under the PL's version of events while thinking they were remaining within the rules. These are highly experienced business people with impressive track records, and they know fraudulent actions when they see them.
As has been regularly reported with great glee in the media, if the PL lands any of the most serious charges, the result will be a points deduction or even expulsion. That wouldn't be the case if this were just a dust-up over the nuances of interpreting which accounting treatment should be applied to certain business operations.
For it as the regulator to decide to prosecute 'charges' that entail the club having acted fraudulently in the way it's accused of doing, one would reasonably expect the PL to have evidence that give it a realistic prospect of reaching the necessary standard of proof. City, on he other hand, claim to have "irrefutable* evidence" of the club's innocence.
There might be a way that the two above positions could coexist. However, it seems to me to be so fanciful and to have such a vanishingly small chance of being true that IMO serious commentary should disregard it.
* - I dislike the word "irrefutable", which the club has chosen to use in various public statements. There's almost no evidence whatsoever that's really open to no question at all. However, I accept that we want to come across as bullish, and in any case the same points apply if we were to replace it with something like "compelling" or even to dial that down and say "strong".
