By Tony Attwood
Whatever else they have ManC don’t seem to have many friends in the media, and that could be something of a bad move for them, because in Englan the media tend to move en masse, stepping out together, blaming together, praising together.
So the general view at the moment is quite simply that they are going to be kickeed out of the league having been served with a £920 million charge for cheating, having inflated their accounts of the revenues by counting illicit payments from owners and through the inclusion of what seem to be non-existent contracts with commercial operations.
Now of course Untold has no evidence for this – I am just reporting what a fair number of media outlets are saying, and I think it is fair to say that at the moment the simple statement from ManC that “we’ve done nothing wrong” in the face of a multiplicity of detailed accusations isn’t actually doing them any good at all on the publicity front.
The commission that has looked into their behaiour runs to 40 pages and the insistance of ManC in rejecting it in a couple of paragraphs isn’t cutting much ice. Especially when the finding of the League is that City’s lucrative sponsorship arrangements were “shams”.
And unless I have missed something, simply saying, “we’ve done nothing wrong” and a sentence or two more, doesn’t really cut it in these situations. We’re all looking for specifics that can be checked against reality, and we ain’t getting nothing.
Of course part of the problem is that when a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family bought the clubs and spoke of “ambitious plans” the implication was that money would be invested and spent.
Indeed, the club itself said that it appreciated the need for investment of “significant funds” if “ambitions were to be fulfilled.” And we all know that means the owner buys the club and then makes money available. So they decided to do the only thing it could: “grow its commercial operations” via “high-value sponsorship arrangements in the UAE generally and in Abu Dhabi in particular.”
But it seems that while Abu Dhabi sponsors were putting money in, that constnatly topped up by the club’s owner – which is not allowed. So each year from 2011/12 onwars the Abu Dhabi sponsors put in £16m while the owner put in ever growing sums – £70m in 2011/2 rising year by year to over £134m by 2017/18 while the Abu Dhabi sum input actually shrkank from 2016/17 onwards”. It has been seen before and is known as a Disguised Funding Scheme,” and I think the fact that it has been tried before is what caught out the sponsors this time. I’m guessing but I think maybe they thought no one had come up with this wheeze before, in which, as the commission says with the sort of world-weary sigh that teachers have when they find boys hiding in the toilets rather than going into lessons, “The club would enter into sponsorship agreements with Abu Dhabi sponsors which contained substantial [fees] at well above fair market value. However, the sponsor would not be liable to pay the recorded sponsorship fee…” The rest came from the owner, via a third party.
This is why the club keeps saying their records show the money comes from another source – it does. The problem is that the source in question got it from the club owner or one of his associates. In short, irrespective of any League rules, the owners were not telling the truth. In reply, the club now say that some of the money came from the Abu Dhabi government.
The problem, however, is the sheer size of the funding, which makes no sense in commercial terms: nearly £1bn over eight years, which was around nine times the contracted sum, suggests something that in my youth we used to call “a fiddle”.
As a result the club got far more money than any other club in the PL and it kept growing. So ManC broke the rules in terms of receiving the money and the rules in terms of accounting for the money received, as well as failing to co-operate with the league by pointing out what was happening (something I think the club has forgotten was one of its duties).
Indeed regarding this last point, the club “made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the Premier League investigation” as well as inventing untrue explanations for the source of the money, “in an attempt to obscure and conceal the reality.” And that’s one of the bits that the club’s testimony fails to address.
Thje League also accuses some of the club’s witnesses of deliberately lying. And this is noteworthy as it then suggests that none of such witness statements can be taken at face value.
Those of course are the big deals, but the enquiry also found ManC guilty of not properly recording contracts in relation to payments to former employees. It was also noted that City sold player image rights but didn’t record the sales correctly.
The League then left the matter for two years before announcing its findings because of the amount of documentation. And the club has said it will appeal and deny any guilt. They have repeatedly said that the opinion contains errors and is unsafe being based on a conspiracy theory.
The appeal must now be heard, and ManC can’t be thrown out of the league until that happens, but after that, the size of the issues raised certainly make ejection from the league a possibility..
