PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[Chris in London]

Unless I’ve read it wrong Lord Pannick - aka Norris Cole from Corrie - is now on 8 grand an hour……

No, that’s Yaya Toure

 

[Rory Bluelow]

Read it for free in the library (not helping to fund our haters).

I agree it’s not on as anti City as some articles but the tone is still is that our club is shady. There’s a half hearted attempt to say what’s wrong with club funding itself but then plays to the gallery by using Newcastle as an example.

We City fans have been treated appallingly by the red loving MSM. Joyful contemplating how our club could be ruined is the norm.

It’s hard not to hate these so called journalists.

References Newcastle AND PSG. The State-owned, dirty money play. He cites the Der Speigel e-mails with no context around our defence and mocks the idea of “irrefutable evidence” as mere legal trickery. As you (and GDM in more detail) point out its more appalling treatment in the MSM. The hysteria around the damage to the PL is bollocks.
If (when !!!) City win, all it will take is a few heads on spikes - and Khaldoon and Allison Brittain will kiss and make up and everything in the garden will be rosy again.

 

[feedmpenzaandhewillscore]

I am one of those who tries to keep up with this thread, but has to skim through because of lack of time, there is one question I would like to ask of the better educated here.
Take the scenario that City have been found guilty of some or all of the substantive "fraud" and "false accounting" charges, based on the flimsy evidence that we know exists, and the Commission uses the "balance of Probabilities" rule to get over the fact there is no incontrovertible evidence of guilt.
The club will obviously appeal if in this position, but my question is what would the other parties who have been tarnished by the verdict do, or what remedies would be open to them.
In particular I am thinking about the Audit firms involved in the whole saga, to the auditors their independence from their client is sacrosanct - they have now been found guilty of colluding with their clients to falsify records with intent to mislead other parties, I don't think this would go down well with these people, is there anything to stop the audit firms from suing the hell out of the PL ??? - I think not, and for this reason I feel that the Commission will only be able to find the club guilty if they can provide some serious new "smoking gun" evidence, the bar must be set very high.
But there may be factors I am not taking into account

If City’s auditors thought they’d been pulling the wool over their eyes for nearly over a decade. Their opportunity to stop working with City would have been way back in 2018 when the Der Spiegal articles were published. The fact they haven’t stopped working with City tells you all you need to know on the matter.

 

[stevetheblue1967]

What annoys me is that its often stated that City are paying Pannick, whos a KC, either £5K, £7k or £10K per hour depending what you read. However, its never mentioned that the PL have also employed several KC and their hourly rate is never mentioned

 

[Mazzarelli's Swiss Cheese]

Read it for free in the library (not helping to fund our haters).

I agree it’s not on as anti City as some articles but the tone is still is that our club is shady. There’s a half hearted attempt to say what’s wrong with club funding itself but then plays to the gallery by using Newcastle as an example.

We City fans have been treated appallingly by the red loving MSM. Joyful contemplating how our club could be ruined is the norm.

It’s hard not to hate these so called journalists.

I think if we 'win' (depending on what that looks like) it could end the PL. We know that the media spin which is becoming ever more intense is that we will either be found guilty, or found guilty and get away with it on some technicality. I don't think I've seen any serious reporting that accepts or suggest we may be innocent. I think anything but a total guilty verdict will give the American owned clubs the excuse to flounce off to a super league. The new CL format is another tentative step in that direction. Obviously if we are found guilty, stripped of points/titles and all the other stuff of rag/dipper wet dreams we'll be heavily punished and the league can go back to their 1990s status quo.

 

[Mazzarelli's Swiss Cheese]

What annoys me is that its often stated that City are paying Pannick, whos a KC, either £5K, £7k or £10K per hour depending what you read. However, its never mentioned that the PL have also employed several KC and their hourly rate is never mentioned

All part of the narrative of dirty money bags city - preparing the ground for implying we bought our way out of it.

 

[halfcenturyup]

This is a surprisingly decent read from our mates at the Guardian.

For those who don't want to click.

https://archive.ph/ZwSiU

Surprisingly balanced for Ronay, but while one or two in the press have begun considering the possibility the allegations may not be proven, none of them are considering the huge obstacles in front of the PL if they want to prove their allegations, or the consequences for the people in the PL if they can't land a serious charge for their 30 million investment, in fact 40-50 million by the time they have paid some of City's costs. They are still peddling the "the emails are convincing" argument of the Magic Harris Hat which has minimal legal weight.

Anyway, there is that. And the fact that City is now an "arm of an influential nation state", apparently. I suppose it's better than state-owned, state-funded, state-supported and the rest but I have no idea what it means in the real world.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

What annoys me is that its often stated that City are paying Pannick, whos a KC, either £5K, £7k or £10K per hour depending what you read. However, its never mentioned that the PL have also employed several KC and their hourly rate is never mentioned

That's just an extension of the constant quoting the cost of our squad when playing a lower league team in one of the cups.

I bet that narrative never saw the light of day when united played Barnsley.

 

[Exeter Blue I am here]

This is a surprisingly decent read from our mates at the Guardian.

Win or lose, Manchester City case poses perilous threat to Premier League power | Barney Ronay

Arsenal clash is part Super Sunday but more importantly Tribunal Day Seven and the stakes could scarcely be higher

www.theguardian.com

It isn’t, for all the reasons GDM so eloquently describes above. It’s a Guardian journalist doing what Guardian journalists always do when writing about City; present an entirely one sided narrative, sneer, reference state ownership, time barring and clever lawyers, and never entertain the possibility that we might not be guilty for a second. That offering of Ronay’s ticks every box……

 

[halfcenturyup]

Would agree but he certainly isn’t stupid, as the article is quite carefully constructed to appear balanced - and the conclusions contained in there are superficially plausible.

He presents three scenarios. The first being that we are found guilty - because we are guilty and that the club will engage in ‘vengeful’ retribution following it. The second scenario is the we are cleared but it’s inevitably qualified on the basis that it could be a just outcome, but by implication may very well not be. And the third scenario, and one he posits as the most likely, is a middle ground and one that crucially involves an admission of guilt on our part.

There is a common theme running through those three scenarios, namely that the club has done something wrong, a view that is underpinned by his description of the emails as ‘compelling’ despite them manifestly not painting the full picture (how could they?) juxtaposed against his derision at the club’s deployment of the word ‘irrefutable’ to describe the evidence we have/had in our possession to rebut these charges, through the prism of a gratuitous and grossly exaggerated reference to the hourly rate of our leading counsel. Along with, of course, the obligatory and misleading reference to the time-barring of the UEFA charges.

And he finishes off the article to remind everyone of the wider geopolitical consequences of a finding of guilt - a worthwhile point but plainly designed to bolster the inference of that gult, given its location at the end of the article.

It’s a carefully constructed, but wholly specious work of sophistry, and whilst conspicuously better written than most of its ilk, is still consciously designed to project the unwavering position that the club must have acted dishonestly.

Maybe it has, it’s perfectly plausible, however unlikely, but it’s the absence of any suggestion at the possibility that the club has not, and what the consequences are that would flow from that (rather than us simply getting away with it) that has marked this wholly dishonest species of article for the last two and a half years.

This may all be true, but the tone of the article is a million miles away from all the other articles he has written about the subject, imo. It's interesting to consider why. He certainly hasn't developed any journalistic integrity over the last few weeks.

Maybe it's a sign of progress?