PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

petrusha said:
No problem. I thought so but just wanted to be sure.



My speculation has always been that the PL overstretched itself in terms of the breadth of the matters it chose to prosecute. In other words, they've added charges on which the evidence is weak in the hope that they might make some stick, and the sheer number of charges feeds into the media-fed public perception that we must have been cheating on an industrial scale.

I've always wondered whether they might not have been better going after us on a smaller number of matters, focusing only on those. We'll see in the fullness of time whether or not I've been correct in thinking that.
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The PL leadership are only interested in damaging City. The 115 narrative was just a PR stunt. The PL is not the CPS so there are no charges just allegations. It has been a witch-hunt since day one.
 
Prophet of Doom said:
Somebody had better tell City to stop paying Pannick his £5k an hour immediately at the closing statements this week. It’s seems the case is already completed and the punishment known before the tribunal has been concluded and the IC have even considered their response.

Name the names or don’t bother posting.
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Ha ha. It would be the first legal case in history (apart from the Nazi regime) where the judges carried out a sanction before they established guilt or innocence!
 
Prophet of Doom said:
But it’s come from an original source that many on here would believe. Not somebody that would have any intentions of shit stirring

It’s might not add up with the stage the case is at, but it is slightly worrying that the original source ( not the poster ) feels he has been told it’s 40 points.

We can’t just believe anything that’s good news or refuse to discuss never mind believe anything that’s bad news.
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But we have discussed it. And we have come to the conclusion that it is, as presented, bollocks. This is nobody's fault. Information can be misinterpreted, especially by journalists.

To summarise: the best information we have is that the hearing is over and the two parties have started their closing arguments. There is even a photo of the PL lawyers arriving this week with CLOSING written on a binder. So there has been no judgment yet.

It's possible that the PL are suggesting such a sanction based on the hearing so far, but even that is a stretch if we believe that the first judgment will just be on facts, with sanctions, if any, decided later in a second hearing.

As I said, there could be a kernel of truth in the story somewhere but it is very, very unlikely (to the extent of very nearly impossible) to be a sanction issued by the panel.

All imho, of course.
 
petrusha said:
When you say "heard ... from someone at Anfield", would I be correct in presuming that this means he was told by from someone in the City end at the recent Liverpool away game, and you're not using "someone at Anfield" as shorthand for someone within Liverpool, FC? It would be a valuable clarification.

As for the veracity of the information, the answer is that, while the Panel might have a strong idea even before closing submissions of how they'll decide on some matters that seem pretty clear cut, no one else knows. That includes the respective parties and their professional advisers. As we've discussed in this thread before, lawyers quite often form an idea of whether or not a court or arbitration case has generally gone well for them, but every litigator I've known has stories about such impressions turning out to have been completely incorrect.

Trying to take the information at face value, the only way I see that there could be a kernel of truth in it would be that it's a reflection of the PL's view of the case and not that of the Panel itself. In other words, I suppose it's possible that the PL could, having heard City's rebuttal evidence, have declined to pursue over 50 of the original charges but are pushing for a 40 point deduction with respect to the rest and they may or may not persuade the Panel to impose such a sanction. I'm inclined to be sceptical, though.
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This story about 50 charges being dropped has been doing the rounds for ages but I'm very dubious.

That number sounds very much like it's the charges under the first heading (sponsorship, related parties, accurate financial statements). And these are the issues substantially dismissed by CAS, so they've always been weak unless the PL found some sort of smoking gun that UEFA didn't. I don't believe for one moment that is likely though.

I've heard (I believe reliably) that we presented our evidence on that part of the charges and it was pretty well the same evidence we presented to CAS, with pretty well the same witnesses. If that is the case, that doesn't suggest the PL agreed to drop those particular charges before they were heard.

It's possible, I suppose, that the tribunal has questioned whether the PL lawyers have that smoking gun. If they don't have that then, without it, the tribunal might be very reluctant to override the CAS decision and may have made that clear. We just don't know.

And the PL may well have asked for a specific deduction of points in its original submission but there's simply no way the tribunal will have applied that before closing arguments have been heard. And they will make their own decision on that.

I'm not saying people don't hear things but my experience is that they don't understand what they've heard, or put a different, often overly sensationalist, construct on the information. There's a big difference between the PL asking for a specific deduction and the panel issuing one, but people hear these things and don't interpret them accurately.

As someone said earlier it's the equivalent of "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance" morphing into "Send three and four pence, we're going to a dance".
 
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Prophet of Doom said:
But it’s come from an original source that many on here would believe. Not somebody that would have any intentions of shit stirring

It’s might not add up with the stage the case is at, but it is slightly worrying that the original source ( not the poster ) feels he has been told it’s 40 points.

We can’t just believe anything that’s good news or refuse to discuss never mind believe anything that’s bad news.
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Unless he is on the legal team that source would have had to get the info from somewhere. It can’t be correct because the case is not over. The only possibility is it was mooted as part of a deal but surely it is too late for any deals.
 
M18CTID said:
Sorry to put a dampener on things this morning after getting back to winning ways but just thought I’d share this. One of our lot was telling me last night that he heard on Sunday from someone at Anfield that 50-odd charges have fallen away but they’re going to find against us on some of the others, and we’re getting a 40 point deduction. Now if this “someone” was a random bloke, then obviously I wouldn’t even be giving it the time of day, let alone posting it on here. However, we all know or have at least heard of this “someone” - who I won’t name but I’m sure some will be able to work out who it is - and he told my mate that he’d heard this from a contact “high up at the club”.

Anyway, this mate who heard this said he naturally wasn’t in the best of moods as the second half kicked off! However, he has plenty of other contacts in the media and at the club. One of his media contacts is someone who’s been his mate for the past 30-odd years and again is someone we all know as he errr, cough cough, posts on here ;) So he asked him if he’d heard anything about this so-called 40 point deduction. The answer he got back was along the lines of “That’s bollocks as they’ve not even done the summing up yet!”. This is a fair point as while I think both sides might have an inkling of how things are going at this stage, if the summing up hasn’t even started (or is just starting going off the pics that have been posted on here), let alone the panel then sitting down and spending months deliberating, I can’t see how anyone would know at this point in time what our punishment - if there is to be any - would be.

Like I say, sorry for the seemingly negative post but I think it’s only fair that info from sources should be shared regardless of whether it’s positive or negative.
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Great news all.
Good chance we will be playing Wrexham and Stockport next year then.
Haaland will clean up in the championship, few more records for him and Nunes may find his level.

Just like the good old days.
 
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