Manchester City's lawyers will present evidence that an Abu Dhabi government body — rather than owner Sheikh Mansour — provided funding to sponsors in the dispute at the heart of the club’s legal battle with the Premier League.
City are expected to lodge their appeal against the guilty verdict handed down by an independent commission before Friday’s deadline. The case has dominated sport headlines for almost a week since initial unconfirmed reports emerged last Friday, with former Manchester United defender Gary Neville saying the Premier League had been “dragged through the mud” by the case.
Appeal to challenge commission’s finding
As first reported by the Daily Mail and The Times, the Press Association says it understands City intend to present evidence to an appeal board which they say refutes the key finding of the original commission that owner funding was being disguised as sponsorship revenue.
The commission concluded that more than £830million of such funding was used to inflate revenues and enable the club to comply with Premier League and UEFA financial rules through a series of “sham” arrangements.
At the heart of the club’s appeal will be an insistence that government funding, provided via the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court (CPC), gave financial assistance to sponsors in the emirate to help them to fulfil their liabilities to City, rather than Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) company which owns the club. The CPC is an independent government entity which supports socially driven initiatives and provides financial and other types of support to businesses.
Club chief executive responds
City chief executive Ferran Soriano said in an address to staff which emerged soon after the Premier League published the commission’s decision on Tuesday: “The whole Premier League case against us is based on a single false accusation – that the owner’s personal money was somehow and secretly put into the club via some sponsors from Abu Dhabi. This is just not true.
“Irrefutable evidence has been provided to the Premier League commission that shows that it could not happen and that it did not happen. This includes bank statements, money transfers, witnesses and everything necessary to categorically demonstrate the money did not come from the owner.”
The 40-page core decision published on Tuesday shows the independent commission rejected the CPC explanation as “untrue” in its findings, adding: “We concluded that it was an ‘explanation’ that the club had concocted well after the event in an attempt to obscure and conceal the realities of the disguised funding scheme.”
Reaction from figures in football
City immediately indicated their intention to appeal on Tuesday evening, saying the commission’s decision contained “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”. The fallout from the publication of the guilty verdict continues, with Neville saying the episode had been hugely damaging to the Premier League’s reputation.
“To listen to this, it is chilling,” he said on Thursday’s episode of the Stick To Football podcast. “We always think that we’ve got an enormous integrity, the Premier League, that we are the sort of league that sets the standard, and that it’s other leagues that have got corruption, fraud, doping scandals, match-fixing, referee scandals.
“This is now coming to our country. This is now coming to our league. This is the greatest export that we have in our country. At the moment we’re being dragged through the mud.”
Former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher believes Sheikh Mansour will have to sell if the club’s appeal fails and they are ultimately found guilty. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Carragher said: “Manchester City are at the end of their Abu Dhabi era. The club can only heal and recover from the shame of their guilt once the custodians recognise they have failed in their duty and sell up.
“There is no way to sugar-coat this. The scale of the institutional cheating and lack of co-operation in the investigation means the position of all City executives involved is untenable. Fighting on will only prolong the agony of supporters who wrongly believe their pleas of innocence.”
Carragher’s views were in contrast to those of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who said on Wednesday he would be “concerned” to lose the Abu Dhabi group as owners. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is,” Burnham told the BBC.
Burnham’s comments came after David Kogan, chair of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), said the ruling “raises serious issues” and pointed out the body has the power to assess the suitability of club owners and executives once proceedings come to a close.
