Abu Dhabi Franchise May Do As It Wants

[RANGERRAB 3,653]

FFP must be the biggest joke of all time. Man City with no debt fell foul of it but neighbours Man Utd with £500m debt were okay.

Then there’s Barcelona & Real Madrid with their soft loans, property deal, non-payment of taxes etc, etc

 

[Devil's advocaat 1,541]

As much as Jose is a figure of fun, he's spot on, if City have done nothing wrong, why have they been fined 10 million? they are either guilty or not, 10 million is a pittance to them, utterly pointless.

 

Man U debt is the owners debt, and is more of a slight on the right and proper person rules than FFP tbh.

[compo 7,030]

42 minutes ago, Devil's advocaat said:

As much as Jose is a figure of fun, he's spot on, if City have done nothing wrong, why have they been fined 10 million? they are either guilty or not, 10 million is a pittance to them, utterly pointless.

 

Man U debt is the owners debt, and is more of a slight on the right and proper person rules than FFP tbh.

Fined for not cooperating doesn't mean they are guilty of anything 

[Uilleam 5,929]

1 hour ago, compo said:

Fined for not cooperating doesn't mean they are guilty of anything 

You will have noticed that the CAS declared that a number of charges were time barred; thus not Not Guilty, and not Not Proven.

 

 

[compo 7,030]

57 minutes ago, Uilleam said:

You will have noticed that the CAS declared that a number of charges were time barred; thus not Not Guilty, and not Not Proven.

 

 

so there was no charges to answer

[Uilleam 5,929]

3 minutes ago, compo said:

so there was no charges to answer

Time barred does not mean that they were devoid of substance, and, clearly, UEFA, and its briefs, thought that they were within the requisite time scale. 

[Uilleam 5,929]

The apparently immininent  full decision from CAS will be interesting, but in the interim.....

 

From today's Times' legal supplement:

 

 

Uefa snatches defeat from jaws of victory

Manchester City’s successful appeal highlights the regulator’s many failures, writes Jonathan Ames

Jonathan Ames

Thursday July 16 2020, 12.01am, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/law/uefa-snatches-defeat-from-jaws-of-victory-j79rmfb7d

 

Manchester City’s executives may have been tempted to emulate Premier League strikers by turning cartwheel celebrations after a ban imposed on the club from participating in European competitions was lifted this week.

However, the top brass at the Etihad Stadium, the club’s legal team, and football lawyers more widely, are keeping a lid on their relief that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned the regulator’s earlier ruling that the club had breached Uefa’s financial fair play (FFP) regulations.

City’s response involved little more than saying that it “wishes to thank the panel members for their diligence and the due process that they administered”. Wider reaction to the ruling from the court in Switzerland on Monday was also muted. As a London lawyer explains: “The financial fair play rules are a sensitive issue for our football club clients — they don’t like to see us speaking in public about them.”

That approach is described as “pusillanimous nonsense” by another lawyer. And indeed a few specialists are robust in their analysis of the case.

“This week’s ruling has merely provoked even more severe doubts that Uefa is just not up to the task both to regulate the financial conduct of European football clubs and correctly enforce the regulations,” writes Mark Stephens, a partner at Howard Kennedy, in this week’s Brief, the weekly legal affairs email from The Times.

There could be no better illustration of the importance of money in modern professional football than this saga.

Nine years ago Uefa introduced the financial fair play regulations so that clubs could only spend what they earn. The aim was to prevent clubs from going bust. Clubs in European competition cannot lose more than £27 million over a three-year period.

Uefa had originally sanctioned City, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, for allegedly providing misleading financial information and failing to co-operate with investigators at the regulator’s club financial control body. Although the court ruling this week ditched the ban, it still fined the club €10 million (£9 million) for obstructing Uefa’s investigation.

Particularly damning for Uefa was that the court found that the charges against City fell outside the regulator’s own five-year limitation period, or were not established. In short, Uefa and its legal team look somewhat inept.

 

Full details of the court’s ruling are expected today or tomorrow. Nonetheless, Graham Shear, a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, says that the ruling “looks like a big blow for Uefa’s credibility as a regulator”.

Shear says that the statute of limitations in the disciplinary rules “is simple in its scope” and that its exceptions, including for fraud, “appear to have been held by CAS not to apply in this case”. More broadly, lawyers point to an odd approach by the regulator, where Uefa pursued a case over events that were alleged to have occurred during a period that appeared to be covered by an earlier settlement with City.

“Presumably, Uefa had detailed legal advice on both points prior to embarking on the disciplinary proceedings and the CAS appeal,” Shear says, “but the outcome cannot help but undermine its reputation for interpreting and enforcing its own regulations.”

James Arnold, a lawyer with Cooke Young & Keidan, says that City’s appeal highlights “procedural weaknesses in enforcing disciplinary measures for FFP violations”.

Arnold points out that club officials at City raised concerns about the process that resulted in the ban in a move that echoed the strategies of AC Milan and Paris Saint-Germain. The Italian and French clubs appealed bans resulting from alleged breaches of the financial rules on the grounds of procedural failings rather than on the substantive charges.

Stephens is clear that in his view the financial fair play regulations are now “dead rules walking”. He says that there is a general failure at Uefa and among some sport lawyers “to appreciate how badly the rules are drafted”.

However, not all specialists share this pessimism. Jamie Singer, a partner at Onside Law, says that the rules “remain valuable and important”, although he concedes that “the belief that Uefa can actually monitor and enforce them has been dealt a huge blow”.

Singer says that the regulator is relatively toothless in that it has no power to force clubs to co-operate with its investigations. “If City chose not to co-operate,” he says, “it made it very hard for Uefa to investigate and secure the evidence they needed to persuade an independent court that the offences had been committed.”

Singer agrees that the rules “need to be reviewed to give them much more teeth to force clubs to co-operate and disclose information. There needs to be severe penalties for failing to do so. It is no use having severe penalties for breaching rules if clubs can obstruct Uefa from ably presenting its case.”

If there is one positive element to emerge from this high-profile and embarrassing episode, Stephens writes in The Brief, it is that “the decision to go against the ruling of [Uefa’s club financial control body] is significant as it shows CAS continues to be sufficiently independent to contradict European football’s rich and powerful governing body”.

Edited July 16, 2020 by Uilleam

[Uilleam 5,929]

If you are going to cheat, cheat fairly.

But hire as many lawyers as possible; and if you can, make sure that at least 2/3 of the independent adjudicators are on-side, and that VAR will not be applied.

 

Cas releases its reasons for overturning Manchester City's Europe ban

Judgment rules that much of Uefa’s case was ‘time-barred’

Cas panel chairman Rui Botica Santos recommended by City

David Conn

Tue 28 Jul 2020 20.46 BSTLast modified on Wed 29 Jul 2020 05.13 BST

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/28/uefa-claim-against-manchester-city-over-sponsor-money-time-barred-cas-rules

 

The charges against Manchester City by Uefa were not frivolous, according to the court of arbitration for sport.

 

The findings that led to Uefa’s club financial control body (CFCB) deciding that Manchester City were guilty of a “serious breach” of financial fair play regulations and imposing a two year Champions League ban have finally been revealed in the judgment of the court of arbitration for sport, which overturned the CFCB’s decisions.

The CFCB found after its investigations and hearings that the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the company through which Sheikh Mansour of the Abu Dhabi ruling family owns City, had funded payments in 2012 and 2013, understood to be £15m each year, that were reported to the Football Association and to Uefa as independent sponsorships from the telecoms company Etisalat.

 

The Cas panel of three European lawyers decided by a majority 2-1, however, that it would not consider the legitimacy of those Etisalat payments, because they were made more than five years before the CFCB charges were brought in May 2019, so were “time-barred”.

Uefa’s rules for the CFCB, whose members are appointed to oversee compliance with FFP, state that “prosecution is barred after five years” for all breaches of FFP regulations.

 

The senior European lawyers in the CFCB’s adjudicatory chamber (AC), and experienced academics, former politicians and executives in the investigative chamber (IC), considered May 2014 as the date of City’s breach. That was when City agreed an FFP settlement with Uefa, based on the club’s reporting of its finances, which included that Etisalat, a Middle East telecoms giant headquartered in Abu Dhabi, had paid the sponsorship itself.

 

In fact, the judgment recites, the AC found that ADUG had funded the payments, and that: “The management of [MCFC] was well aware that the payments … made by [a third party on behalf of ADUG] were made as equity funding, not as payments for the sponsor on account of genuine sponsorship liabilities.” The judgment notes that although City and Etisalat had agreed a sponsorship deal in principle in 2012, the actual contract was concluded only in January 2015, and was stated to be retrospectively effective, from 1 February 2012.

In public statements throughout the process, City had accused the members of the IC, AC and Uefa itself of bias against the club, claiming they ignored “irrefutable evidence”. The Cas judgment makes no suggestion of bias, and states that “Uefa by no means filed frivolous charges against MCFC. As also acknowledged by MCFC, there was a legitimate basis to prosecute MCFC.”

 

The Cas judgment also contains the extraordinary revelation that the panel’s chairman, Rui Botica Santos, a Portuguese lawyer, was recommended by City. Cas rules for appeals state that each party chooses one arbitrator, then the chairman is selected by the chairman of Cas’s own appeals arbitration division. No explanation has yet been given for why City suggested the chairman for this case, although the judgment notes that Uefa did not object.

 

Some European sports lawyers, speaking to the Guardian, have questioned the independence of the panel member nominated by City, Andrew McDougall QC, a partner in the international law firm White and Case. McDougall was chair of his firm’s operations council for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, from 2016-2018, which includes an office in Abu Dhabi. That office lists Etisalat as a client, and the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, whose sponsorships were also central to the case, as well as several Abu Dhabi state enterprises.

The Cas rules state that “arbitrators must be independent, [having] no particular connection with any of the parties”. There is no suggestion of actual bias on the part of either of City’s nominated arbitrators.

 

City’s position is understood to be that McDougall himself has not acted for those Abu Dhabi companies although his firm has, and that the club’s hierarchy recommended him because of his strong reputation as a lawyer. Uefa did not respond to a question about whether it raised any objection to McDougall’s appointment. McDougall declined to respond to questions from the Guardian about whether he had an apparent conflict of interest in sitting on the case.

 

Uefa’s nominee was Ulrich Haas, a German law professor based in Zurich, a long-term arbitrator on Cas panels.

 

The Etisalat evidence, as well as the more widely reported allegations relating to City’s Etihad sponsorship, was a principal reason underpinning the AC’s findings that City were guilty of a breach serious enough to warrant a two-year ban and €30m fine. The FFP rules, introduced by Uefa in 2010-11 to encourage responsible financial management by clubs, limits the cash owners can pour in, which makes independent sponsorships more important for boosting revenues. Like all relationships between clubs and sports governing bodies, the system relies on trust and honest reporting.

 

The allegations relating to Etihad’s sponsorship were based on City’s own internal emails, published as “leaks” by the German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, prompting the IC to ask City for an explanation. The emails included three from City’s then chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, to Simon Pearce, a senior City executive, setting out that in 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2015-16, direct funding from Etihad was only £8m, with ADUG funding the rest, which was £59.5m in 2015-16. One email to Pearce enclosed invoices for the sponsorships, with only £8m charged to Etihad.

City were found to have obstructed and failed to cooperate with the CFCB’s investigations, but they gave the Cas panel more cooperation, with executives including Pearce providing evidence and appearing as witnesses, insisting that Etihad funded the whole sponsorship. Sheikh Mansour himself also provided a letter, stating: “I have not authorised ADUG to make any payments to Etihad, Etisalat or any of their affiliates in relation to their sponsorship of MCFC.” On the basis of the further evidence it considered, the Cas panel found the Etihad charge to be “not established”.

The judgment reveals that on 9 March this year, nine other Premier League clubs wrote to Cas opposing any attempt by City to seek a “stay of execution” allowing them to play in Europe next season if the appeal hearing was delayed. The clubs were Arsenal, Burnley, Chelsea, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle, Tottenham and Wolves. But three weeks later City told Cas it had not requested a stay of execution. Cas agreed with City that the clubs’ claim was therefore “moot”.

 

Edited July 29, 2020 by Uilleam

[Uilleam 5,929]

....And there's more.

 

I dislike this club more and more; it has done the impossible and taken the bad face off of UEFA.

 

 

Verdict that kept Manchester City in Europe delivers some glancing blows

Cas judgment outlines reasons for finding in favour of City, but shows the club’s case wasn’t as ‘irrefutable’ as it made out

David Conn

Tue 28 Jul 2020 23.13 BSTLast modified on Wed 29 Jul 2020 05.13 BST

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/28/verdict-that-kept-manchester-city-in-europe-delivers-some-glancing-blows-cas-judgment

 

 Manchester City refused requests for evidence and witnesses during the investigation. 

 

So Manchester City’s hierarchy won the war they waged furiously against European football’s governing body Uefa, but the reality of the victory does not quite match the claims they made during their long campaign.

The panel at the court of arbitration for sport decided 2-1 in City’s favour to overturn the comprehensive guilty finding and two-year Champions League ban imposed by Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) in February, but the published judgment nevertheless exposes a core of contradictions in the club’s case. In May 2019, after the CFCB’s “investigatory chamber” (IC) referred charges to the “adjudicatory chamber” (AC) that City – owned by Sheikh Mansour of the Abu Dhabi ruling family – overstated sponsorships by the state airline Etihad and telecoms giant Etisalat, the club publicly accused the IC’s chairman, Yves Leterme, of bad faith and “a basic lack of due process”.

 

City have never explained what evidence supported this serious public criticism, or the allegations of bias made against Leterme and all members of the IC, AC and Uefa itself after the AC’s guilty decision in February. But the club’s statement said: “The accusation of financial irregularities remains entirely false and the CFCB IC referral ignores a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence provided by Manchester City.”

The Cas panel’s full 93-page judgment does not quite support that: City’s hierarchy did not provide “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence”; they refused requests for evidence and witnesses and obstructed the investigation. Criticising City for that, the judgment even states that the club itself accepted there were legitimate grounds for the charges: “The panel is of the view that Uefa by no means filed frivolous charges against MCFC. As also acknowledged by MCFC, there was a legitimate basis to prosecute MCFC.”

Advertisement

While they did overturn the AC’s decision by a majority, the panel did not actually find that City’s alleged financial irregularities were “entirely false”. They found one of the AC’s key findings “time-barred”: that in 2012 and 2013 Etisalat had not paid £15m in sponsorships, which in 2014 City declared to the CFCB when making a settlement under the financial fair play rules. The judgment recites the finding that Mansour’s company vehicle for owning City, the Abu Dhabi United Group, had made or “caused to be made” those payments instead. It also notes that the CFCB did not have a fully “complete and accurate picture of two payments to MCFC in 2012 and 2013” when the settlement was agreed.

 

The panel overturned the guilty finding relating to Etisalat because two of their members decided that any breach of rules had not happened in 2014 when, the AC and IC found, City’s financial information provided for the settlement was false. Instead, presumably to the bemusement of the IC, AC and Uefa’s lawyers, the Cas majority decided any breach happened in 2012 and 2013, when the payments were made. CFCB rules require breaches to be prosecuted within five years – even if the evidence only emerged in November 2018 when the German magazine Der Spiegel published “leaks” of City’s emails. So, the Cas panel decided the Etisalat charges were “time-barred” when the IC prosecuted them in May 2019.

 

City’s complaint that they presented the IC with “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” stood for longer than a year before the details now revealed that they obstructed the investigation. The Cas panel found that City’s hierarchy declined to provide emails and other documents when asked by the IC and AC, and refused requests for executives to appear as witnesses.

 

This toxic saga has featured an aggressive, ruthless approach from City, which has deeply poisoned relations with Uefa

They did provide more testimony to Cas, with City director Simon Pearce, and former Etihad chief executive James Hogan, among others, giving evidence, and with the Etisalat charges timed out, the panel decided that the AC’s finding that Mansour had also substantially subsidised the Etihad sponsorship was “not established”.

More broadly than the precise legal findings, this toxic saga has featured an aggressive, ruthless approach from City’s ownership, which has deeply and unnecessarily poisoned relations with Uefa. Of course it was grim for City to have their internal emails exposed – the club saying they must have been hacked; Der Spiegel’s source, Rui Pinto, denying it, as he now denies criminal charges against him in Portugal for hacking in relation to other leaks. Nevertheless, it was shocking to see the email from the club’s lawyer, Simon Cliff, who wrote that City’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, had told Uefa’s then general secretary Gianni Infantino, that he would not accept a financial sanction for exceeding the FFP permitted €45m loss when assessed in 2014. Cliff said: “[Mubarak] would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years.”

Ultimately, based on the information City provided – apparently including the stated £15m sponsorships from Etisalat – Uefa and City then agreed a settlement.

 

Cliff also sent a tasteless email reacting to the death of Jean-Luc Dehaene, the then IC chair, and like Leterme a former prime minister of Belgium, writing with reference to the seven-person IC: “1 down, 6 to go.” Mortifying as it must have been for him to see that private bad joke held up to the light of day, and insistent as City were not to dignify an alleged hack with any response, they might just have dealt with that by apologising.

The hierarchy’s scornful statement after the AC’s guilty decision was in effect contradicted within days in an in-house video interview with their own chief executive, Ferran Soriano. City had again claimed the process was biased, naming and blaming Leterme, and refusing to recognise any CFCB independence from Uefa. “Simply put, this is a case initiated by Uefa, prosecuted by Uefa and judged by Uefa,” the club said.

Giving an expanded reaction, Soriano explicitly did recognise a distinction between Uefa and the CFCB. “We are not talking about the whole of Uefa, which is an association of [Europe’s national football] associations,” he said. He explained that he knows many people working at Uefa, “for the benefit of the clubs of Uefa like ours, but also for the benefit of football … Uefa is much bigger than this FFP chamber.”

 

Loyalists to Uefa’s FFP system, which has deterred European clubs from spending beyond their means on wages and hugely improved the game’s overall financial stability, reject that anyway. The CFCB process is integral to Uefa, and is set up to be as independent as possible so that the FFP compliance processes are credible. Whatever, Soriano’s acknowledgment of Uefa as a decent governing body never punched through the months of denunciation. Some fans arrived at City’s next Champions League match – privileged heights to which the Abu Dhabi mega-money has taken the club – with banners including “Uefa Scum” and “Uefa Mafia”.

 

Since Mansour took over City in 2008, Mubarak’s regime has been exceptionally skilled at balancing their unchallengeable spending – £1.3bn from the ownership – with good public relations: celebrating the club’s heritage and supporter loyalty, embracing good causes, investing in the community. In their war with Uefa, that slipped. City’s ownership was revealed as a group prepared to wave millions at lawyers to hammer European football’s governing body for trying to uphold its rules. City’s hierarchy have won that war, but apart from their own supporters, whom they encouraged to join in, their approach has not done much to win friends or influence people.

 

[Bluedell 5,624]

On 14/07/2020 at 22:48, RANGERRAB said:

FFP must be the biggest joke of all time. Man City with no debt fell foul of it but neighbours Man Utd with £500m debt were okay.

Then there’s Barcelona & Real Madrid with their soft loans, property deal, non-payment of taxes etc, etc

 

Yeah, I can't get excited about it. They received funding. Does it really matter whether it's sponsorship or funding from the owners?