https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...er-treatment-of-paris-saint-germain-wr5vz29n5
Here's the full text of that Times article.
One of Uefa’s financial fair play investigators has resigned over the organisation’s handling of its case against Paris Saint Germain.
Petros Mavroidis, a Greek law professor, is understood to be unhappy that Uefa did not mount a defence in the Court of Arbitration for Sport after PSG’s lawyers claimed that the Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body’s (CFCB) adjudicatory panel had missed a ten-day deadline to review the case.
Mavroidis is also believed to have questioned the handling of the FFP case against AC Milan, despite the Italian side being excluded from European competition this season.
Uefa has since changed the wording of its FFP rules to ensure that other clubs do not use the same loophole in the future. Galatasaray, the Turkish club, had already won a CAS ruling on the ten-day deadline – Uefa did not defend that case on the advice of its lawyers and the CFCB’s investigatory chamber, nor the following case brought by PSG in March this year.
Uefa’s initial investigation was to examine whether PSG had flouted rules aimed at preventing clubs from spending more than they generate through revenues. The French club have previously been sanctioned by Uefa for breaching FFP rules, in 2014 when Manchester City were given the same penalty.
City are also involved in a new FFP case which has yet to be ruled on – proceedings were opened after leaked emails suggested the club had provided misleading financial information. City have gone to CAS to challenge the legitimacy of Uefa’s investigation.
Mavroidis, who is also a professor at Columbia Law School in New York, was due to step down as an investigator at the end of the season anyway as his term was up. It is believed he was unhappy with the approaches to both the Galatasaray and the PSG hearings.
Mavroidis refused to comment to
The Times, saying: “I would not like to speak in public about my involvement with a Uefa committee.”
In June 2018, the CFCB’s investigatory panel had recommended that Uefa close an investigation into PSG’s finances in the three years running up to the summer of 2017, before the club signed Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. That recommendation was not unanimous however, with some of the investigators including Mavroidis believing the panel should have recommended opening proceedings.
In September, the CFCB adjudicatory panel reviewed the PSG decision and said it should go back for further investigation – the court ruled however that was outside a ten-day deadline for a review stated in the rules.
Since the outcome of the CAS hearing, Uefa has clarified its rules so that the adjudicatory panel now has 10 days to call in a case and 20 days to review it.
Uefa has since said that it has no existing investigations open against PSG. All clubs in European competition have to show they are breaking even over a rolling three-year period.
In its ruling on PSG in March, CAS said: “The review conducted by the adjudicatory chamber should have taken place within ten days and that since the challenged decision was issued beyond the ten-day time limit, the challenged decision was untimely and must be annulled.”
