A mystery figure from the United Arab Emirates paid Manchester City £30 million, a leaked report has revealed.
The Uefa report, produced in 2020 but never published, concludes that the two £15 million payments from 2012 and 2013 were made to cover sums that were supposed to have come from one of their main sponsors. The payments are expected to be part of the 115 alleged breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules that City were charged with in February.
The report has been obtained by the makers of a YouTube film about City’s finances. It comes only three weeks after City celebrated clinching the Treble by winning the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history.
• Why are City facing 115 Premier League charges?
The adjudicatory committee of Uefa’s Club Financial Control Board’s (CFCB) report concludes that the payments, which were supposed to come from the UAE’s majority state-owned telecommunications company Etisalat, were actually “disguised equity funding”. It alleges that funding came from City’s owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the investment group headed by Abu Dhabi’s vice-president, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The report says that during a Uefa disciplinary hearing, City’s lawyer named the person who paid the money as “Jaber Mohamed” and stated that he was “a person in the business of providing financial and brokering services to commercial entities in the UAE”. The report adds that “. . . the obvious question, not answered at any point in the club’s submission and evidence, [is] why either Etisalat or ADUG should have needed any financial assistance from a broker in paying the Etisalat sponsorship liabilities.”
City’s case was that Etisalat repaid the money to their owners in 2015, but that was not accepted by the Uefa adjudicatory committee. It imposed a two-year European ban on City in 2019 only for it to be overturned a year later by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which ruled that the £30 million payments could not be dealt with as rule breaches because they were time-barred. Two of the three CAS panel members also cleared City of receiving disguised equity funding via the Etihad airline, saying that claim “remains unsubstantiated”.
Significantly, however, the Etisalat payments can be dealt with by the Premier League among its charges as, unlike Uefa, it has no time restrictions. City have declined to comment on the latest allegations.
Under Premier League and Uefa financial rules, club owners are limited as to the amount of equity funding they can put into a club to cover losses, but the amount of sponsorship funding is unlimited. The Premier League’s charges over financial reporting relate to nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18.
City have also been charged with not co-operating with an investigation and handing over documents as required over five seasons from 2018-19 to 2022-23.
The adjudicatory committee’s report has been obtained by the makers of a film covering City’s financial charges, Britain’s Biggest Football Scandal?, which has been released on YouTube by Surise Media.
The makers of the film have kept their identities secret but insist they are not funded by any Middle East state or any other agency, though it is believed that City suspect there may be geopolitical motives behind the production. There have long been political tensions in the Gulf, particularly between the UAE and Qatar.
There are no credits on the film other than the production company, Surise, which was registered in the British Virgin Islands on June 9 and has used a law firm in London to seek comments from City, Uefa and the CAS.
A copy of the Uefa report has also been seen by The Times, which has independently verified its authenticity.
The report states: “At the hearing, leading counsel for the club, responding to questions from the adjudicatory committee, stated that the payer was Jaber Mohamed.”
Sources with knowledge of the Uefa case have told The Times that investigators were unable to verify the identity of Mohamed, and tried unsuccessfully for City to provide him as a witness at the CAS hearing.
Uefa’s investigation was launched in 2018 after the publication of the “Football Leaks” emails by the German media outlet Der Spiegel. Charges were brought alleging that tens of millions of pounds of sponsorship money from City’s Abu Dhabi sponsors was paid directly to the club by ADUG.
The adjudicatory committee’s report concludes that “arrangements were made under which payments were made or caused to be made by ADUG but attributed to the sponsorship obligations of Etisalat so as to disguise the true purpose of equity funding, and those arrangements were carried into effect by the payments made by Jaber Mohamed totalling £30 million.
“The management of the club was well aware that the payments totalling £30 million made by Jaber Mohamed were made as equity funding, not as payments for the sponsor on account of genuine sponsorship liabilities.
“On that basis the management could not properly have caused the club to account for the liabilities purportedly due under Etisalat 1A and Etisalat 2 as sponsorship revenue due from Etisalat for services rendered by the club.”
The report also states that the audited annual financial statements submitted to the English FA by City “overstated the club’s true sponsorship revenue” by including the full amount that Etisalat was due to pay for the years ending May 31, 2012 and 2013.
Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, told the film-makers: “The emails were important. For us it was clear that Manchester City were cheating with its commercial income and were deflecting from the losses.”
The CAS ruled that the charges relating to the £30 million payments should not have been dealt with by Uefa as they had passed the five-year time limit.
The Premier League’s investigation has also taken into account another batch of leaked City emails and documents published by Der Spiegel in April 2022, eight months after the CAS decision.
