City lambasted by court
Etihad club withheld evidence four times, says appeal court Uefa criticised for failing to get tough with English team
Manchester City should be “severely reproached” for showing “blatant disregard” toward financial fair play investigators from Uefa, according to the sporting appeal court which quashed the club’s two-year European ban.
Manchester City should be “severely reproached” for showing “blatant disregard” toward financial fair play investigators from Uefa, according to the sporting appeal court which quashed the club’s two-year European ban.
A 93-page written explanation from the Court of Arbitration for Sport discloses how the club obstructed investigators four times by refusing to hand over evidence before they were initially banned from the Champions League in February. The Uefa charges were “not frivolous”, the Swiss court ruled, adding that there had been a “legitimate basis to prosecute” City for allegedly overstating sponsorship deals.
However, City may still have been able to avoid their European ban and lengthy appeal process to overturn it had they been more forthcoming during Uefa’s original case against them, the papers suggest.
The court was severely critical of European football’s governing body for failing to prise evidence from the club before it reached the appeal stage, which finally concluded earlier this month. “Allowing clubs to hold on to relevant evidence until the proceedings before Cas would seriously risk turning the proceedings before the CFCB [club financial control body] into a farce and would render the entire CFCB process very inefficient,” the Cas report says. “This cannot be tolerated or endorsed.”
The judgment picks apart elements of the case brought by Uefa following revelations by Football Leaks in 2018, detailing how the governing body’s counsel alleged that equity contributions of at least £204 million provided to City by their owners were “disguised as sponsorship income”.
Cas said Uefa’s case with respect to “funding being channelled through unidentified third parties” was based on “innuendo” and did not meet the “requisite standard of proof ”. A majority of the panel found that the Etihad sponsorship deals had been negotiated at “fair value” and instead ruled that Uefa’s theory on disguised equity funding “remains unsubstantiated”. The documents detail how City claimed Uefa’s “inferences” of wrongdoing were drawn from seven “criminally-obtained” documents (six emails and one attachment out of a total of 5.5 million hacked documents) that were “confusing snapshots, taken out of context, of matters that simply did not happen in the way that has been portrayed”.
However, Uefa described City’s behaviour as “the most serious, sophisticated, deliberate and fundamental attempt to circumvent and violate basic financial fair play principles”.
Cas ruled that the leaked email comprised “admissible evidence” and that the public interest element in holding City accountable “outweighed” the fact that the leaks were from hacked documents.
The court ruled, however, that it “is not comfortably satisfied that the arrangements discussed in the leaked emails were in fact executed”. Instead, the club was ordered to pay a €10 million fine – down from the €30million sanction imposed by Uefa five months ago – for the evidence allegedly proving that officials obstructed the investigation by the independent adjudicatory chamber of Uefa’s club financial control body.
Cas found most of the alleged breaches of financial fair play rules were either not established or timebarred, but also highlighted the club’s “failure to co-operate” in the document.
“The majority of the panel finds MCFC’S failure to co-operate with the CFCB’S investigation is a severe breach and that MCFC is to be seriously reproached for obstructing the CFCB’S investigations,” Cas said.