Manchester City CAS Ruling Explained
By: Ted Fred Franky, Refuting misinformation, June 7, 2023 1 year ago
The real reasons why CAS cleared City
You can find the CAS PDF here
This issue has been deliberately widely misreported by large sections of the UK and European press to give the false impression City only got off on a technicality.
The UEFA judgement against Manchester City was set aside (section 2) with Manchester City were cleared of all charges except Article 56, here is the section stating so:
Article 56 relates to not co-operating fully with the UEFA Investigatory Committee, although CAS understood the reasons why Manchester City had done so, and reduced the fine accordingly.
These are the detailed elements of the decision CAS made:
To break this down:
(a) Some of the allegations are time barred.
(b) Part vi) states that the Allegation Regarding Equity Finance are Time-barred, and part viii) states that even if they weren’t time-barred City did not disguise Equity Finance.
(c) City failed to co-operate with the UEFA investigation.
The allegation (b) regarding disguised equity finance was the most serious charge, and also had the knock on effect of affecting whether City broke even or not ie a subsequent breach. This is the charge that effectively led to the original ban.
So when people say City only got off because the allegations were time-barred this simply isn’t true, the allegations were not proven to be true either.
City also wenton to prove that the emails were not related to the allegations made by UEFA, and one of them was two emails spliced together. In other words the Der Speigel allegations upon which this was all based were a total fabrication.
Main CAS Points
The important bits of the CAS Report are these:
Evidence
This section makes it clear that the only evidence UEFA presented was the emails published in Der Spiegel:
So despite a lenghty investigation by UEFA with a team of forensic accountants going through Manchester City’s Company accounts and Bank accounts, they failed to find any evidence of any wrong doing. this is fairly damning on UEFA’s Investgatory Committe (Rick Parry and Yves Leterme)
Emails were sent before FFP came in
This section also notes that some of the emails in question were sent before FFP came in, and therefore could not be evidence that City had done what UEFA alleged. Obviously, if City were doing this before FFP, and FPP then banned this practice, surely City could and would change what they were doing?
Emails do not prove anything
This section makes it clear that the leaked emails do not provide sufficient evidence to back up the allegations made against Manchester City, and that CAS disagreed by a “majority” decision.
So many times in the anti-City press you read the term “majority” replace with a “2-1 majority”, to indicate there was doubt in the decision. Nowhere in any CAS report, including this one, is the actual majority indicated. The term “unanimous” is never used nor are any numbers given either, so “majority” simply means either a 2-1 majority or a 3-0 majority.
If UEFA’s allegations were true, City’s accountants and auditors must be lying too
If UEFAs allegations were true then, City would have had to have misled UEFA, their accountants and auditors, which simply isn’t plausible and cannot be accepted without any evidence to prove that this happened.
All City’s sponsorhip payments were all made properly
The payments were made as City had claimed not as UEFA alleged.
UEFA did not ask City to disclose specific information
UEFA had the right to force City to produce anything specific that they wanted, however UEFA made no such attempt, therefore the fact City “failed to co-operate” made no difference to the investigation. In other words, City should not be punished for failing to co-operate because it is UEFAs incompetence in dealing with this matter which is the issue.
At the end of the day how can you punish City for not producing specific documents if UEFA did not specify what it was they wanted?
City did not disguise equity funding
Conclusion
These points show the UEFA Investigation Chamber (Rick Parry and Yves Leterme) in a really bad light. Only one of two things could possibly have happened:-
- They made a complete and utter pigs ear of the investigation.
OR
- They could not find anything to support the claims made by Der Spiegel, and should have cleared Manchester City and not prosecuted them. Therefore the prosecution by the UEFA Investigation Chamber put before UEFA’s Arbitration Council was entirely malicious.
