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Amid all of the uncertainty around the Manchester City hearing, there is one view that can be stated with confidence as it finally gets under way. That is that the case will continue as it started, with minimal information coming into the public domain. There are only a handful of people on the planet who actually know how it has gone so far, and that will remain the case given that the three-person independent commission will hear the charges in private. Questions can already be asked about what this says about transparency in football regulation. City insist upon their innocence.
There is nevertheless one detail that more informed executives are repeatedly raising around the case, that could prove absolutely integral to its outcome. That is the name “Jaber Mohamed”, which first came to light in last year’s YouTube documentary Britain’s Biggest Football Scandal? In the initial Uefa disciplinary hearing from an investigation into the Football Leaks emails, City’s own lawyer stated that “Jaber Mohamed” was “a person in the business of providing financial and brokering services to commercial entities” in the United Arab Emirates. On the club’s own admission, Abu Dhabi United Group [ADUG] - the name of the company that Sheikh Mansour had used to buy the club - “caused” for £30m to be paid by Mohamed on behalf of main sponsor Etisalat over 2012 and 2013. The telecom company didn’t actually pay for anything until 2015.
There are a number of obvious questions from this that the club is likely to have to satisfactorily answer over the next few weeks, especially given this is ultimately about whether financial information was accurately disclosed. One, as Uefa’s own report stated, is “why either Etisalat or ADUG should have needed any financial assistance from a broker in paying the Etisalat sponsorship liabilities”. It could be argued that this question is all the more pronounced since both Etisalat and ADUG feasibly have access to the same UAE state reserves of trillions of pounds through UAE’s state links. This, as Uefa’s report stated, was “not answered at any point in the club’s submission and evidence”.
Another question is how a club would allow a company to reap the benefits of a high-profile sponsorship despite not paying them for three years. Why would anyone other than Etisalat be paying most of their obligations? City argued that the telecoms company repaid the money to their owners in 2015, but this was rejected by Uefa’s Adjudicatory Chamber, who concluded this was “disguised equity funding”.
It was also the core of the judgement that saw the club initially banned from the Champions League for two years, especially since it allowed the chamber to infer a pattern of behaviour in another example involving Etihad. There, the emails reported by Der Spiegel were alleged to show the airline was paying only £8m of sponsorships worth £35m, £65m and £67.5m from 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2015-16.
Uefa only had the Football Leaks emails in the case of Etihad, not accounting information. The evidence was still found credible because the airline had made two separate payments for the 2015-16 sponsorship that tallied with the amounts set out in the relevant email. Since City refused to hand over further emails or allow relevant individuals to give evidence, this represented a failure to co-operate, so the chamber was entitled in Swiss law to infer the same patterns of behaviour as with Etisalat.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport didn’t have to deal with anything related to Jaber Mohamed, however, because the judges ruled by a vote of two to one that the Etisalat evidence was time-barred. Although the accounts for the telecoms company example had been submitted inside the May 2014-May 2019 time limit, the payments had been made earlier. Two of the judges ruled that it was the timing of the payments that mattered. This meant that the Etisalat evidence couldn’t be used to draw inference for the Etihad case, either, which was how CAS ruled that the claim of disguising equity funding “remains unsubstantiated”. Uefa’s ban was overturned.
The view of some of those from that investigation, as well as senior football insiders, is that the Jaber Mohamed example remains key because this was City’s own evidence. It cannot be disputed. The argument is also that it laid out hard facts that afford the right to believe all of the emails are credible. That went beyond one common counterpoint that this ultimately just comes down to interpretation of the emails, or even wider issues like the failings of PSR or poor drafting of the rules as in the recent Leicester City case.
The latter two, particularly, are tangents that don’t have real bearing on this case.
It is merely about available facts and claims matching, and the allegation of dishonesty.
As regards the facts of the dates that CAS ruled on, those time limits do not apply to the Premier League case. The English competition’s investigation also had access to a second tranche of Football Leaks emails that were released after the CAS decision, and essentially represented the documents that Uefa had been asking for throughout their case.
It is possible that some of this could have been addressed with the initial Premier League investigation. As it stands, however, 30 of the charges regard breaches of rules requiring member clubs to co-operate with the competition’s investigations.
City’s legal justification for refusing to co-operate with the Uefa case was the legal principle that information was “hacked or stolen”. That stance has further enraged some other executives, though. That is because the Premier League is actually nothing more than a members’ club, with the 20 partners merely signing up to its rules. This, in part, is why expulsion is being talked about.
One of the most widespread predictions for the case is that City will, at the very least, face a significant punishment for non-compliance, especially since that issue was so prominently raised in the Everton and Nottingham Forest judgements.
Even after the CAS decision, Bjorn Hessert – a University of Zurich research assistant for one of the judges but writing in a personal capacity – argued that City’s failure to provide a key document was a violation of Uefa’s rules that “should have resulted in a ban”. Hessert found the outcome all the more “unfortunate” since it serves to “punish the compliant clubs”.
These represent two major questions that are at least likely to significantly influence the outcome of the Premier League case. One is how City address the case of Jaber Mohamed and Etisalat. Another is how the Premier League view the extent of non-compliance.
It is going to take some time, however, before anyone outside a very small group of people has any idea how they go.
