sortiwa
[ad_1]
Manchester City could face sanctions in the Premier League, potentially being docked points, for the same alleged financial fair play breaches that resulted in Uefa imposing a two-year ban from the Champions League and €30m fine.
The Premier League has been progressing with its own investigation into the club’s alleged falsification of its sponsorship revenues. That is understood to have involved some hearings at which City have been represented by lawyers. Neither the league nor the club has been prepared to comment on the investigation, but the new Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters, confirmed recently that it is continuing.
As City have been handed a severe punishment by Uefa’s club financial control body (CFCB), against which the club is appealing to the court of arbitration for sport, the Premier League could impose heavy sanctions if it too finds the serious allegation proven that City breached their trust. The Premier League has its own FFP-style regulations, introduced two years after Uefa’s, when its 20 clubs immediately transformed a previous overall loss of £219m into a £198m profit
The Premier League announced last March that it had begun an investigation into City’s affairs, releasing a statement which appeared to cover all the areas in which the defending champions had been accused of wrongdoing by the German magazine Der Spiegel, based on “leaks” of internal emails which City said had been hacked.
The first, which led to Uefa’s guilty finding, was that City had overstated their sponsorship revenues to Uefa and in their own accounts between 2012 and 2016, because the club’s owner, Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi, was largely funding the stated £67.5m sponsorship by the country’s airline, Etihad. That was a breach of trust under Uefa’s FFP rules, which limit how much an owner can put into a club to bankroll losses.
Der Spiegel and other publications with access to the same emails also accused City of making an irregular payment to the agent of Jadon Sancho when he was a 14-year-old player in the club’s youth system, and of being involved in a “third-party ownership” player investment fund. City have denied any wrongdoing. The Premier League came under pressure, reportedly from other major clubs, to mount its own investigation after the CFCB announced last March that it was investigating the FFP allegations.
[ad_2]
Source link
