PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

2 things on the Herbert piece. The arrangements between City and Etihad weren’t particularly mind boggling - we’ve seen some of the contracts from the period in question. They are notable in their normality for deals of this type. What may be complex are the inner workings of Abu Dhabi’s funding of its airline (and other state funded businesses) but we’ve already seen this at CAS and frankly, I’d read that as the first line of an excuse for the PL (perhaps “City’s defence relied on matters we were in no position to challenge”). Of course, it could also just be total nonsense.

The other aspect that is notable and important is the idea that it is only City that have to accept the IC decision. On the contrary, if the verdict goes with City, the PL and the rest of football will have been found to have pursued an unfounded multi year serious fraud case it could not make out. It is all parties that need to accept the verdict but City should also receive a very large cheque for its costs.
 
petrusha said:
Nor does it mean that, as he seems to suggest, there must therefore be something wrong with them. Obviously, as we've done to death on here, if they're set up with a view to creating a fraudulent disguise for shareholder investment by portraying it as sponsorship income, then THAT would constitute (among other things) rule breaches along the lines of the accusations against City.

Otherwise, the arrangements presumably amount, in the final analysis, to: individuals at City with connections to the Abu Dhabi royals or government apparatus allowing AD publicly owned sponsors preferential payment delays by making funds available to MCFC pending reimbursement; AD public body shareholders of such companies providing the latter with funding to meet the sponsorships obligations; or a combination of the above.

OK, fine, but how does this constitute, as the ‘charge’ references, a failure to provide "in the utmost good faith ... accurate financial information that gives a true and fair view of the club’s financial position, in particular with respect to its revenue (including sponsorship revenue), its related parties and its operating costs". Maybe there's an argument it does, and the PL obviously thinks so. It's far from evident based on the information in the public domain, though, and the explanations in the preceding paragraph are IMO prima facie far more persuasive.

As pithily stated in the post I've quoted, this field isn't an area of strength for Herbert, a lamentable illiterate in serious legal and financial matters He proclaims himself a friend as well as a former colleague of Nick Harris, on whose judgement here he's in all probability relying. Yet while Harris is more knowledgeable than Herbert on these issues, the former’s proficiency is still grievously deficient itself and, moreover, is tainted by a stench rather than a whiff of manifest bias.

There are all kinds of issues potentially at play here, none of which either Herbert or even Harris is even close to capable of analysing in competent or credible fashion (as opposed to Nick’s detailed but myopic rehashes of the ‘prosecution’ case). I could speculate what the issues at hand might possibly be, but I'm really not sure that it serves any purpose. Nonetheless, in this monster of a thread they've all had an airing at some point anyway.

That said, unless City have been improbably and monumentally stupid in the drawing up and execution of the arrangements, I'd contend that they're really not especially likely to be the subject matter of the kind of fraud or deliberate concealment that would allow the statutory time-bar to be lifted for issues before season 2016/17. And it's hard to see how the accounts didn't give a "true and fair" view thereafter.

The latter argument seems to me to apply even if one accepts the wholly contentious premise that AD sponsors should have been declared as "related parties", at least as long as the fees under the relevant contracts were broadly at market value. No doubt our accounting brethren will pull me up on this one if I have it wrong.

TL, DR. Another year, another vacuous, cheerleading piece of simplistic clickbait bullshit from Herbert, coming close to straying over the border with outright mendacity if it doesn't actually do so. No surprises there. Still, I have to give the guy credit for one thing, namely his sheer chutzpah in being that grotesquely ugly yet being prepared even so to appear in public without a bag over his head. He has looks and intellectual ability on the same level.
Click to expand...

Another classic post. Even includes a gratuitous insult. Excellent :)
 
Herbert won’t have any inside track on what’s going on and has demonstrated his lack of understanding and impartiality on the subject. I wouldn’t bother giving it a click, it’s the equivalent of a client journalist for the post office writing an article that he hopes all accused post masters should just accept their charges and not fight them.
 
halfcenturyup said:
That's actually quite interesting, although I doubt Herbert will understand why.

Clearly some of it is just simple journalistic and uninformed nonsense but, assuming he actually did hear that the panel looked at the mind-boggling complexity of the AD sponsorships (which isn't news, btw, as it was already exposed in the APT case, for Etihad at least) and if his source is using that as an indication that City may have been using complex contracts to get around FFP (rather than, say, oh I don't know, the much more serious allegation that Mansour paid the sponsorship himself) then that may be an indication that the PL's allegations over funding sponsorships failed, and their attention was instead drawn to the related party nature of the deals and their fair value as we discussed a while ago.

That is an important shift in tone imho from very serious legal fraud issues to less serious and more esoteric accounting issues and is a good one for people looking for "signs".

Of course, it may be that I, Herbert or both are all talking just plain bollocks, but I reckon this may be the first indication that the PL actually struggled with its more serious allegations as we always thought they would.
Click to expand...
Would we not be in a good position over related party I mean there is an accepted definition in accounting terms. We have no related party deals in the accounts right ?

If new evidence comes to light about the sponsorships that makes people think they are related would that be considered false accounting and also would any of this be bad faith etc

Not sure when it started to diverge for FFP and if that’s covered in the charges
 
feedmpenzaandhewillscore said:
Herbert won’t have any inside track on what’s going on and has demonstrated his lack of understanding and impartiality on the subject. I wouldn’t bother giving it a click, it’s the equivalent of a client journalist for the post office writing an article that he hopes all accused post masters should just accept their charges and not fight them.
Click to expand...
The narrative of our enemies has changed from “City and their Arab owners are cheats who must be relegated” to “ Their finances are too complex to understand. They must have something to hide.” Smells like good news to me.
 
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