At last, after all the waiting and wondering, the Premier League hearing into Manchester City’s 115 alleged financial rule breaches begins today (Monday).
February 2023 saw the process kick off when City were referred to an independent commission over the alleged breaches over provision of accurate financial information which go back to the 2009-10 campaign.
FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY City, champions for the past four seasons, are also charged with failing to comply with Premier League rules requiring clubs to follow UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations from the 2013-14 to 2017-18 seasons and failing to follow Premier League rules on profit and sustainability (PSR) from the 2015-16 to 2017-18 seasons.
City, who beat Brentford 2-1 at home on Saturday, have always denied any wrongdoing and insisted they would vehemently contest the charges. The hearing, behind closed doors, is expected to last 10 weeks with a verdict by the end of the year with any appeal to be settled by the end of the season.
PENALTIES IF City could face penalties such as a points deduction or relegation if found guilty. Everton and Nottingham Forest had points deducted last season for breaching PSR regulations.
The consequences are almost unimaginable for the world’s most high-profile league and its dominant club which boasts a network of 13 teams across five continents under the ownership of a billionaire member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.
A guilty verdict would cast an immense shadow over not only City’s achievements in the past decade but the future of manager Pep Guardiola – whose contract expires at the season’s end – and his players. It could also generate comopensation claims from other clubs.
Rui Pinto role
The saga was set in motion six years ago by Rui Pinto, a Portuguese computer hacker, whose access to “millions of documents” about various clubs’ financial dealings provided ammunition for the Football Leaks website.
Last year Pinto was handed a four-year suspended sentence by a Lisbon court on counts of attempted extortion, illegal access to data, and breach of correspondence.
The damage, however, had been done. In 2018, the German publication Der Spiegel claimed City had manipulated contracts to circumvent UEFA rules and published leaked documents, including emails purportedly sent between top City executives over several seasons after the club’s Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008.
They alleged that these showed the club had inflated sponsorship revenue from state-owned airline Etihad and state-controlled telecoms firm Etisalat by disguising direct investment from its holding company (Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group, or ADUG) as sponsorship income by channelling the funds through the companies’ accounts.
The rulebooks
This, it was alleged, was a means of meeting financial fair play rules introduced by Uefa in 2011, and Profit and Sustainability Rules brought in by the Premier League in 2012, limiting clubs’ permitted losses.
Further allegations followed of alleged misreporting of financial information centred on documents that claimed to show secret ‘off-the-books’ payments to then-manager Roberto Mancini via consultancy fees from a club in Abu Dhabi, and paying players more money than registered in the accounts so that recorded spending was less than it actually was.
City – who have always maintained that ADUG is a private fund rather than an arm of the state – refused to comment on any of Der Spiegel’s revelations, saying the leaked emails were obtained illegally, and that they were an “attempt to damage the club’s reputation”.
UEFA action
Both club and companies strongly denied breaking any financial rules. But that did not stop both UEFA and the Premier League launching investigations as a result.
City had already been fined millions of pounds by UEFA in 2014 as part of a settlement after they were found to have breached FFP rules. In 2020 they were banned European club competition for two seasons after being found to have committed new breaches.
Subsequently the Court of Arbitration for Sport quashed the ban, saying that it had found “no conclusive evidence that they disguised funding from their owner as sponsorship”, and that most of the alleged breaches of rules were either not established or ‘time-barred’ because they fell outside the five-year statutory limit for prosecution.
However, it did find City had committed a “severe breach” by failing to co-operate with UEFA’s investigation, with an initial £25m fine reduced to £8m.
Investigations rolled on behind the scenes. In July 2021 a High Court judge revealed that the Premier League had effectively accused City of delay tactics by failing to agree to hand over documents, ordering the club to do so.
Then, in early 2023, City were hit with the mass of 115 charges, relating to every one of the years since the club was bought by Sheikh Mansour.
Credit: AIPS Media
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