PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[tolmie's hairdoo]

Maybe reading too much into it, but watching the actual video of those quotes and there’s a confidence, almost smugness, about him. He certainly does not look worried.

It's been the whisper for a while City expect nothing more than a non-cooperation charge, a fine at best.

 

[Big Dave Watson]

It's been the whisper for a while City expect nothing more than a non-cooperation charge, a fine at best.

We really shouldn’t even be accepting that to be fair.

 

[johnny crossan]

I have appeared as an expert witness quite a few times in a past life, albeit always at magistrate / sheriff court level and in connection with food quality / contamination issues. My view is that flipping a coin would probably give a more accurate judgement. I was normally asked to appear by a food company although at times I did warn them that sometimes my evidence might not be to their advantage but I would have to give it as I saw it.

Anyhow let me give you an example of a case where I thought that there was a cut and dried ‘not guilty’ verdict coming.

The case involve a metal bolt in a sausage. By the time I got the evidence it had been mauled by a public analyst. However it was clear that the sausage had been cut along its length and the bold was more or less central and the head had been approximately flush with the plane of the cut with the shaft of the bolt at right angles to the length of the sausage. That in itself is unlikely. We put some bolts of the same size and shape through the sausage filler at the Research Association where I worked, and admittedly with a small sample size, they tended to go through into the sausage with the head leading the way and with the shaft following at an angle of about 30 degrees. The head normally went towards the outside of the sausage. This would be expected as the sausage meat would tend to push the head forward with the shaft following. I analysed the metal that the bolt was made of and found it to be cadmium plated, such bolts would not be allowed in food machinery. The bolt was a good match for bolts used in telephone exchanges at the time.

The public analyst had reported that as he pulled the bolt out of the sausage with tweezers the force require was such that it indicated that the bolt had been cooked inside the sausage rather than being pushed in afterwards. We cooked bolts in sausages, pushed bolts into sausages and screwed bolts into sausages and measures the force required to pull them out with an Instron and found no difference between the force required pull out the bolt between that which had been cooked in the sausage and that which had been pushed in and a very small,increase in the force required to remove the bolt that had been screwed into the cooked sausage.

My colleague, a meat technologist, carried out a factory inspection and found no bolts resembling those found in the sausage (though he didn’t go 30’ up to the roof to inspect the sheilded fluorescent light fitting). The metal detector consistently rejected a pack of sausages with the bolt inside one of the sausages and the factory records showed that the metal detector was functioning correctly and had been checked as required on the day the sausage had been manufactured.

In my view we had assembled irrefutable evidence that the bolt had not got into the sausage in the factory. Certainly enough to to raise reasonable doubt that it had been the result of a factory incident.

At the court case the complainant who was a telecom engineer working in an exchange gave evidence. He was a middle aged slightly below average height and slightly above average weight for his height, bespectacled and balding. Asked for his account of how the bolt had been discovered he responded “I was making supper for my disabled wife……..”. At this point I thought that simply because the alternative to it being a factory incident was, effectively, to accuse him of deliberately putting the bolt into the sausage that the magistrate would find it easier to find the company guilty, which he did. Perhaps the under threat Scottish “not proven” verdict (which was in my view the most appropriate verdict in many of the cases I was involved in) would have provided an escape route for the magistrate.

Or as the Romans put it more pithily - res ipsa loquitur.
Your sausage your factory your fault.
Occam's razor. The straightforward explanation is usually correct.

 

[SilverFox2]

It's been the whisper for a while City expect nothing more than a non-cooperation charge, a fine at best.

Whilst on legal matters nothing is certain as Stefan is at pains to say but surely our owners will be aware of both legal "hands" now so this feeling of success will be based on a knowledge of the evidences and apparently continues.

 

[Bentheblue]

It's been the whisper for a while City expect nothing more than a non-cooperation charge, a fine at best.

Not disputing what you say but I’m puzzled as to how City can think this when according to the media and PL the actual hearing, which is scheduled to last for some weeks, has’nt started.

 

[OB1]

It's been the whisper for a while City expect nothing more than a non-cooperation charge, a fine at best.

Let’s hope that is how it pans out.

I can’t say often enough how the whole thing is a farce: the rules were plain wrong to begin with… City are a model of how to invest in a club…

The one thing I do know is that Pep does not carry the air of a worried man; of course we won’t know until it’s over if he has been told all the facts but until someone proves otherwise I will continue to believe KAM is an honest broker.

 

[dadnlad]

Not disputing what you say but I’m puzzled as to how City can think this when according to the media and PL the actual hearing, which is scheduled to last for some weeks, has’nt started.

So u don't think they've over egged the cake to make it appear there doing indepth legal challenge when in theory they've got nothing (hopefully)
All part of charade

 

[BringBackSwales]

Not disputing what you say but I’m puzzled as to how City can think this when according to the media and PL the actual hearing, which is scheduled to last for some weeks, has’nt started.

I suppose because we know what the charges are and how good our evidence is

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

What has this got to do with anything? Launch another thread on food standards if you want

This is part of the fun of this forum, where you can go from the legal and international tax implications of image rights payments, to cadmium-coated bolts in sausages within a few posts.

 

[halfcenturyup]

True. One small aspect still causes me a touch of concern. CAS did clear us, great, but as those still circling snidely point out some of that was because some issues became time expired. Unlike in this open ended prem witch hunt. Am happy to be corrected.

A couple of things.

First, do those circling ever mention what was actually time-barred at CAS? Because the only things that were time-barred were Etisalat and one of three years for which UEFA alleged disguised equity funding of the Etihad sponsorship.

For Etisalat the club put forward a compelling explanation in their submission to CAS, which I am quite happy to accept as reasonable.

For Etihad, the allegations weren't proven for the two years that weren't time-barred, so there is no reason to believe they would have been in the one time-barred year.

Basically, the time-barring argument is bollocks.

Second, there is time limitation in the PL case against the club. Although this is something those circling refuse to accept by putting fingers in their ears. Actually, the PL needs to show deliberate concealment to look at anything before 2017. I am pretty sure they won't be able to do that with Mancini, although they may have a better case on player payments (we don't have enough information on that to judge, really). For Etihad and Etisalat, if the allegations are the same as UEFA's charges you can expect the same outcome unless the PL has something really incriminating. Which I think is very unlikely.

I think all that is (reasonably) accurate.