An independent Commission has found Manchester City guilty of all charges relating to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules over a nine-season period. The Premier League has confirmed that Manchester City have been found guilty of all charges relating to serious financial breaches between the 2009/10 and 2017/18 seasons.
The independent Commission also found the club guilty of the majority of charges relating to its failure to cooperate with the Premier League’s investigation.
The independent Commission stated: “Manchester City arranged ‘sham’ contracts (which misrepresented the true agreement between the parties) with a number of its commercial partners, as well as relying on ‘sham’ agreements with others, to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs.
“The club filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators.
“Manchester City was significantly in breach of both the Premier League’s and UEFA’s spending limits.
“During the Premier League’s investigation, Manchester City committed multiple breaches of its duties of co-operation and utmost good faith towards the League (three of the four alleged breaches were upheld).
“The independent Commission found that Manchester City arranged ‘sham’ commercial deals with a number of its sponsors during the period, which were part of a disguised funding scheme, whereby those companies were only required to pay a portion of the relevant sponsorship fees. The remainder was funded by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd (ADUG), which owned the club. As part of the scheme, further ‘sham’ arrangements, funded by ADUG, were entered into to enable the club to record lower operating expenses than it actually incurred, as well as a ‘sham’ circular arrangement with Fordham, an entity that purchased the club’s players’ image rights, that was funded by ADUG.”
The EPL added: “The purpose of these schemes was found to have been to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than £900 million during the affected period, to appear to comply with financial rules. The consequence of this, as the Commission found, was that the club filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of its finances from its auditors and football regulators.
The Commission concluded that ‘by its conduct the club clearly intended to circumvent the PL Rules.
“As a result, Manchester City failed to accurately report its income and expenditure for the purposes of the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules and UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Rules. The Commission found that, had all of the relevant agreements been reported accurately in the club’s accounts, it would have been in breach of both the League’s and UEFA’s spending limits by a very substantial amount.
“In addition, during the course of the four-year investigation conducted by the Premier League, the club committed multiple breaches of its duties of co-operation and utmost good faith towards the League. The Commission concluded that the club had ‘made concerted efforts to stop and frustrate the PL investigation.”
The Premier League has published a redacted version of the independent Commission’s findings.
The sanction will be addressed separately at a further hearing, meaning Manchester City have not yet been punished for the breaches.
City have the right to appeal the Commission’s findings and have until Friday, October 2 to exercise that right.