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Uefa rejected legal advice that they had grounds to appeal after Manchester City were cleared of financial rule breaches by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The Independent has learned that external lawyers proposed an appeal to the Swiss courts as Uefa’s best response to City’s victory at CAS in July 2020, which got their Champions League ban lifted.
The revelation Uefa were advised there were grounds to appeal may give encouragement to the Premier League, who are prosecuting City for 130 alleged FFP breaches based on similar evidence in a hearing that concluded last week.
CAS overturned a two-year Champions League ban imposed by Uefa four years ago for a “serious breach” of their regulations.
The legal opinion advising that an appeal was possible was sent to Uefa in August 2020 outlining their possible options following the CAS judgement.
The CAS verdict had been delivered in July following City’s appeal against the punishment imposed by Uefa’s club financial control body (CFCB) five months earlier.
The 28-page written document is understood to have offered five potential options for Uefa: a civil law appeal; an appeal to the Swiss courts; an appeal to CAS; opening more disciplinary proceedings against City; and taking no further action.
Of the five options the legal advice described an appeal to the Swiss courts as “the likely legal remedy,” and added that they believed there were sufficient grounds for this taking this course of action.
Uefa are understood to have received separate legal advice from a Swiss firm stating they had little chance of success, which led to their decision not to appeal. Uefa and Manchester City declined to comment when contacted by The Independent.
The revelation that Uefa were advised they had grounds and a specific legal route through which to launch an appeal could be significant however, given that the Premier League have charged City with alleged FFP breaches based on similar evidence.
The legal advice rejected by Uefa was prepared following the release of the second tranche of emails relating to City’s past sponsorship deals by German magazine Der Spiegel in July 2020. The content of the second batch of leaked emails, which the Premier League’s lawyers have access to, appeared to cast doubt on much of the evidence given by City executives at the original Uefa and CAS hearings.
City have never commented on the substance of the Der Spiegel emails beyond describing them as “leaks” that were “criminally obtained” following the publication of the first batch in November 2018.
Der Spiegel’s source was the man behind the Football Leaks website, Rui Pinto, who was given a four-year suspended sentance by Portuguese courts last year after being convicted of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence.
Der Spiegel published the new emails on 30 July 2020, two days after CAS released their full 93-page judgment detailing its reasons for overturning Uefa’s initial guilty verdict.
Uefa had found that the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the company through which Sheikh Mansour of the Abu Dhabi ruling family runs City, had funded payments to the club in 2012 and 2013 that were reported as sponsorship income from the telecoms company Etisalat.
The CAS panel of three European lawyers overturned that verdict by a majority of two to one however. CAS ruled that it could not consider the legitimacy of those Etisalat payments, because they were took place more than five years before the Uefa charges were brought in May 2019, making them “time-barred”.
CAS also ruled that “based on the evidence in front of it… the majority of the panel is not comfortably satisfied that the arrangements discussed in the leaked emails were in fact executed.”
The second Der Spiegel email dump from July 2020 contained more detailed allegations of City disguising owner investment as sponsorship income.
Much of the content is based on messages allegedly sent by City director Simon Pearce, who was also a senior executive in an Abu Dhabi government authority. One of the new emails was allegedly sent by Pearce in December 2013 to Peter Baumgartner, then Etihad’s chief commercial officer, with the subject “payments”.
Pearce set out that under its sponsorship agreement Etihad owed City £31.5m for the 2012-13 season, and £67.5m for the £2013-14 season, a total of £99m. “So we should be receiving a total of £99m – of which you will provide £8m,” he wrote to Baumgartner. ”I therefore should have forwarded £91m and instead have sent you only £88.5m. I effectively owe you £2.5m.”
The figure of £88.5m Pearce allegedly sent to Etihad for forwarding to City tallies with the same figure, £88.5m, set out to him in one of the previously published emails.
Man City vehemently denied that the Etihad sponsorship was subsidised by the club’s owner, or any other Abu Dhabi company.
