I think we're pretty well in agreement on this. Whether Etihad is or isn't a related party has no bearing on the sponsorship itself, which has to be at FMV regardless. And that's never been challenged.
Looking back at the CAS document though, they said that the issue about related parties was that if Etihad et al were deemed to be related, then we could be held to have misreported this in our financial statements.
The reason I thought it was a strange hill to fight a battle on was that any attack on the valuation of the sponsorship seems doomed to fail. Any attempt to prove that it was disguised equity funding seems doomed to fail. The only avenue of attack therefore is that it was a related party, which is corroborated by the background to the APT case, where clubs felt we were misreporting this.
But even if that is the case (and neither of us believe it is) that's certainly not going to lead to any sporting penalties such as points deductions.
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