UEFA FFP investigation - CAS decision to be announced Monday, 13th July 9.30am BST

[mat]

Respect Souness there !

Irish media happy to discuss hacking despite the big Liverpool fan base. Our media?

 

[BlueAnorak]

It's irrelevant because the parties disagreed and we entered a settlement. It's a moot point and exactly why they can't now come back on it (IMO)

Quite - We actually fundamentally disagreed on the changes to the FFP filing spreadsheet that was changed such that we missed FFP targets by €100m+ rather than by €10m or so.
UEFA would have definately lost a court case over claiming the sponsorships were not IAS 24 related party compliant.

 

[Deleted member 77198]

I wonder who the presenter supports?

Utd or Liverpool?

More like the producers of the show thought “we’ve got Liverpool legend Souness, someone who was treated poorly by City in Quinn, and Kerr who’s not going to be a City fan is he? We’ll roast City tonight”...

The debate is opened and it’s all pro-City and the producer will be in the presenter’s ear shouting; “INTERRUPT THEM, THIS IS GOING TERRIBLY YOU IDIOT, SAY ‘BUT CITY HAVE BROKEN THE RULES’, MENTION THE RULES, INTERRUPT THEM YOU IDIOT, YOUR JOB IS ON THE LINE HERE”

Presenter; “but City have broken the rules!”

And then they all still defend City!

The producers will have had their heads on the table in the back room.

Brilliant!

 

[inbetween]

What I cannot get my head around is this concept of related parties, or not related parties, and how it applies to our sponsorship revenue.

When formulating the FFP rules and the calculation of the break-even requirement, UEFA decided not to use some arbitrary method of determining this, but instead to use already well know and understood principles as defined in International Accounting Standards. The very same principles auditors use when determining whether income should be declared as being from related parties or not.

This was in theory a wise and sensible move. Not only are the rules well known and understood by all the audit firms, they contain rules and guidelines which apply objective, not subjective tests. For the very reason that we do not want to have a situation where companies accounts are open to interpretation, with one firm saying one thing and another firm concluding something different. If a party is deemed not to be related, then all of the income from that organisation is by its very definition "fair market value" since it was fairly obtained from the market! Of course the opposite is true: If revenue is coming from a related party, then there is a question about the basis upon which that revenue was secured and therefore a question about what the fair value would have been had it been obtained on the open market.

As I understand it, Etihad Aviation Group is owned by the Abu Dhabi government, not by ADUG and neither by any other organisation over which Sheikh Mansour has control. In any event the question as to whether Etihad is related or not, will have been the subject of our annual audit of our accounts. And our independent accounts have repeated signed off our accounts on the basis that Etihad is NOT a related party. To do so, knowing or suspecting this to be untrue, would be a criminal offence and surely something that any reputable accounting firm would never contemplate.

So how on earth is it that UEFA can unilaterally decide that Etihad *is* related? Sure it may smack of being a bit of a fiddle - since we can all imagine there may be possible influences which could be brought to bear amongst the upper eschelons of the Abu Dhabi powers that be. But that is really not the point, and is - from UEFA's perspective "tough shit". IAS24 - the standard which deals with related parties - has very specific objective tests, which we have passed. It is not within UEFA's remit to decide upon a different set of criteria. Their own rules say they will apply IAS24 standards, and those standards define Etihad as not being related.

And if Etihad is not related, then there can be no question of us having artificially inflated our revenues (from Etihad). They are what they are, as stated in our audited accounts.

What am I missing here? Apart from UEFA being a bunch of crooks who will make up the rules as they go along and as it suits them, of course.

UEFA didn't rule the state owned Qatar Tourism Authority sponsorship of PSG as a related party.

The president of PSG is also chairman of the Qatari investment vehicle, part of the Qatari state that owns the Qatar Tourism Authority.

He is also part of the UEFA executive committee..............

He is also chairman of BEin which provides much of the Spanish league coverage.

And who sponsors leading Spanish clubs like Barcelona? Qatar Airways and the Qatar Tourism Authority.

Who do the Qatari's really hate in the Middle East at the minute? The UAE and the Saudi's.

Where are our owners from? The UAE.

Who are the Qatari's friends with? The Russians. Who sponsors UEFA CL? Gazprom. Who owned Gazprom? Abramovich. Have Chelsea faced FFP sanctions? Of course not.

This is all purely coincidental of course!!!

This whole thing goes far beyond football I'm afraid.

 

[give it to gordon]

what are the chances of once we are cleared of 'cooking the books or what ever UEFA are calling it '' our accountants could take UEFA to court for damages ?

 

[BlueMoonz1977]

I wonder who the presenter supports?

Utd or Liverpool?

presenter comes across like he is hurting as the panel go against his own theory


love it

 

[lunarblue]

Ticket info just gone up on the club website now - I'll be surprised if this drops below 20,000 points:

Thanks. Unfortunately I don't have enough points so I'll probably end up watching it in the pub.

 

[BlueAnorak]

Yes, there's an odd contradiction at the heart of the matter. UEFA sources seem to be briefing their friendly journalists (Panja and the like) that they're confident of CAS upholding their position. Yet MCFC continue to maintain that the club has "irrefutable evidence" to back up its claims that there are no grounds for punishment. Logic dictates that one of these propositions must be wrong.

Now, I can't stress strongly enough that what follows in this post is absolute speculation. It's just my best guess at the kind of scenario which might give rise to the oddity described in the preceding paragraph.

If there's an element of subjectivity, then in the absence of further information I can only think that it must be around the definition of a "related party". Of course I could be completely wrong here and this is purely speculation on my part, but maybe City are continuing to maintain that the Abu Dhabi sponsors aren't related parties, while UEFA are claiming that they entered into a settlement agreement in which that proposition wasn't challenged in the absence of the newly information about Abu Dhabi state funding of our sponsorships that would have altered their view on that topic. It may (or may not) be that the settlement agreement contains provisions that allow UEFA to reopen matters if they consider themselves not to have been provided with all relevant information at the time, and they regard the information about AD state subsidy of the sponsorships as meeting that criterion.

Interestingly, Panja and his boss at the NYT were tweeting yesterday about the possibility of some kind of settlement, while Tony Evans tweeted an article he'd written (which I confess to not having read) that seemed to purport to urge the parties to get together and sort things out. These journalists have in the past relayed material ostensibly sourced by people who are connected with the case and certainly aren't in the MCFC camp. I wonder whether this might point towards UEFA hoping for a settlement before matters reach CAS.

In this hypothetical event, I'd actually be tempted as long as they'd agree to a suspended ban and reduced fine, together with a statement that any breaches were technical and entailed no intention to deceive UEFA. Even if our case is relatively strong, litigation and arbitration can always be a lottery to some extent and it's invariably better to avoid it if you can.

The prospect of the club's majority shareholder and our Abu Dhabi stakeholders accepting a settlement on the terms that I would is, in my uninformed view, negligible. Remember that UEFA have found us guilty of inflating sponsorships and, if that's true, it means the club's audited accounts are inaccurate. That's a big accusation to throw at a business, because it brings into question the honesty and good faith of those running it as well as of the auditors. For that reason, in my opinion only total exoneration is likely to be seen as acceptable in the UAE.

Great post and it pretty well reflects my own thinking.

At the risk of getting boring and without knowledge of the details of what exactly we're charged with, my opinion is that we should agree with UEFA that solely for the purposes of FFP Etihad are a related party although we and our auditors don't accept they are under IAS 24.

In return they will agree that their sponsorship represents fair value for the period under review and that the source of funds is therefore irrelevant. They'd found that hard to disagree with, with Leterme having seemingly signed off Qatar's PSG sponsorship at €100m. QED on that score.

That might not be the only issue they're looking at of course but one thing I'd kind of forgotten is that I believe all this relates to stuff we did in the 2012/13 financial year, when we thought we had a chance of escaping punishment under the provisions of Annex XI S2. So we were stuffing the accounts as much as we could , which I explained to George Hannah a couple of days ago was a bit cheeky but probably not technically illegal.

Had UEFA been consistent on how clubs needed to do the relevant calculations then we probably wouldn't have thought about doing that. But they weren't and gave us every encouragement to carry on down the path we did, bringing forward partnership remittances and getting costs off the City books where possible. Had UEFA introduced its rules on controlled funding earlier, we wouldn't have needed to do that.

So while it sounds a bit dramatic, it's possible we could put forward some sort of "entrapment" argument, that UEFA deliberately led us on, knowing full well they were going to change the rules to those that could have given us a much better chance of achieving a controlled break-even position.

I agree. But it's irrelevant as the gloves are now off.
FFP rules are a complete cut and paste of IAS 24 accountancy rules. So IAS 24 rules apply as to the definition a related party apply until UEFA change the rules.

 

[BlueAnorak]

If its a mistake its UEFA's https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...accounting-sponsorships-uefa-champions-league "After further research Uefa was also advised that Etihad should be considered a related sponsor because of relationships of Mansour’s with members of the extended ruling family involved in the airline."

Conn talking out of his arse again I see. If FFP rules are cut and paste of IAS 24 rules as to the definition of a related party, then that is what will apply in a court of law

 

[CC1]

Completely agree about the boycott. We should have immediately withdrawn and started whatever legal proceedings were available. As I posted almost immediately, they've filed for divorce and are welcome to it!

Our continued presence in a competition that we've been informed we are not welcome to attend next season is both ludicrous and untenable. Continuing to persist with the illusion that it can all be made OK by CAS is a sycophantic delusion.

As the club hasn't had the moral fibre to pull us, then as fans we should carry out a 100% boycott. Any amount of whistles, tennis balls, banners and boos whilst we still attend will do nothing other that make us look like sulking children.

In short, it should have been an expulsion of all things UEFA and a message to never darken our doors again. This is about the integrity of Manchester City and kowtowing to UEFA in anyway severely damages that beyond repair.

The club is about football. Players want to win every competition - why would we pull out of the Real Madrid game and cut off our nose to spite our face!! This is exactly what UEFA would want - saves them more work to throw us out!!