Fresh reports have emerged that Manchester City arranged “sham contracts” with a number of its commercial partners as part of a scheme to disguise secret funding of more than £830m, the Premier League says.
The League confirmed that City have now been found guilty of all charges related to breaches of Premier League financial rules between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons.
An independent commission found that, during that period, the club arranged the “sham contracts” as well as “relying on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs.”
The club continues to deny any wrongdoing and has until 2 October to submit an appeal.
News broke last week that City had been found guilty of breaking the majority of the 115 financial rules they were accused of breaching, but on Tuesday the Premier League published a redacted version of the commission’s report.
The commission’s report said the charges “concerned well over 100 alleged individual breaches of Premier League Rules across four broad charge categories.”
It also found the club guilty of all charges except one relating to non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation.
The sham commercial deals were described as being part of a “disguised funding scheme” to the scale of £830.69m.
City recorded £360m in sponsor fees in the three seasons they won the Premier League, 2011-12, 2013-14, and 2017-18. Only £43m of it was legitimate, the rest came from their owners and was disguised.
“The relevant sponsorship agreements were found to be shams, or at minimum did not reflect their economic substance,” the commission said.
It also describes “deliberate or reckless conduct intended to circumvent the Premier League rules” and that the “sham” scheme devised by City allowed the club “to avoid recording what would otherwise have been the largest single-season loss in Premier League history in 2009-10.”
The commission highlighted the scale of evidence it had to consider by pointing out that the index alone ran to more than 750 pages, while the core bundle of documents “ran to many tens of thousands of pages.”
City are owned by the Abu Dhabi United Group, who took over the club in 2008 and are referred to as “ADUG” in the commission’s report.
