Manchester City have been banned from the UEFA club
competitions for the next two seasons by Uefa and fined €30m
(£25m)
after they were found to have seriously misled European football’s governing
body and broken financial fair play rules.
The severity of the ban from both of Uefa’s elite club
competitions, and the scale of the fine, reflects how seriously Uefa’s FFP
compliance bodies consider the club to have breached the rules and code of
conduct.
City were found guilty by Uefa’s Club Financial Control
Body (CFCB) of having false inflated their sponsorship revenues, when they made
submissions for the FFP compliance process. The guilty finding follows an
investigation sparked by the publication of “leaked” emails and documents by
the German magazine Der Spiege in November 2018.
The “leaked” emails and documents appeared to show that
City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling
family, was mostly funding the huge, £67.5m annual sponsorship
of the City shirt, stadium and academy by his country’s airline, Etihad. One of
the leaked emails suggested that only £8m of that sponsorship in
2015-16 was funded directly by Etihad, and the rest was coming from Mansour’s
own company vehicle for the ownershipof City, the Abu Dhabi United Group.
More to follow…..
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