AC is made up of more than a single judge, they can only look at the evidence from the IC who rushed through their verdict due to the 5 year time rule. City have stated public that their evidence, 200 page document wasn’t considered. I think you should look at the history of the lead investigator Leterme, he’s dodgy to say the least In the PSG case the AC were aghast at his conduct
Maybe you will or maybe you won’t I hope you do
The process absolutely seems questionable. I’m sure we’ll question it thoroughly. That’s what CAS seemingly look at, the process of what transpired against the rules that each party signed up to. Leterme is also not without his faults, but he ultimately didn’t sign off on this, even if he was the public narrator.
I’m aware that CAS will now give us three judges as opposed to one. However it seemed overlooked to many that a proper, high standing judge had reviewed our case and decided we we worthy of a two year exemption from the Champions League (plus associated revenue costs) and a €30m fine. Somewhat unprecedented measures. It wasn’t Gill and Parry et al that eventually found us at fault, it was a high standing European judge.
I reiterate, I hope we can deliver a conclusive argument that clears us of all charges and leaves no doubt about our innocence. I’d personally take an exoneration with loads of hanging questions marks right now just to move on! However I think the mere fact we’re in this predicament suggests we’re not as on top things as we think/ hope and there are weaknesses in our position that we need to get leading legal people to fight.
Time will eventually tell what these eventualities look like, but we inevitably have some sticky areas that we need to explain. The fact we decided to talk about aspects of these areas in email correspondence seems pretty poor judgment by those involved, given their professional standing.
I’m sure in all our walks of life we occasionally make poor decisions, but in a very public facing business these could be subject to serious exploitation. We’ve been exploited via hacking to defend a case other parties wanted answering almost since our takeover and were openly pressuring UEFA about investigating. We paid our high ranking people significant sums of remuneration to hopefully avoid such eventualities. Alas, it didn’t workout because we made internal errors of judgement that were leaked, reported and then collated to make us, at this stage, in breach of regulations, even if those regulations are not seemingly very fair from an objective viewpoint.
I think it is though fair to say UEFA will be told some of their processes are poor etc. but will that be enough for them to lose the case?
Time will tell and it depends what we can prove/ have up our sleeve.