The Manchester City football club has been under investigation by the Premier League for three years due to a potential violation of the rules, including illegal payments to underage players, German Spiegel reported today.
The investigation was also conducted due to “inflated sponsorship agreements and hidden payments to former coach Robert Mancini”, the BBC reported that the SPIEGEL wrote.
The Premier League and Manchester City declined to comment on the allegations.
Spiegel published the details of its three-year investigation in cooperation with the EIC journalist network in each of the three areas.
City believes that the latest details are a continuation of previous accusations regarding the regulations on financial fair play, which he believes are designed to harm the club.
As it is stated, the champion of the Premier League allegedly put pressure on underage players to “sign contracts with the club through cash payments, violating the rules”.
The sponsors of the club in Abu Dhabi allegedly provided only a part of their payments to the club, and the rest was the owner of the club, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi.
City is also accused of paying a significant part of the compensation to former coach Robert Mancini “through a fictitious consulting contract”.
In 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) lifted City’s two-year ban from participating in European competitions after the European Football Union (UEFA) ruled that the club had committed serious violations of financial fair play between 2012 and 2016.
CAS said that City showed “obvious neglect” of Uefa’s investigation into potential violations of the rules of financial fair play, but that it did not find any convincing evidence that City concealed the financing of its owner as sponsorship.
Uefa has launched an investigation against City after Spiegel released documents that leaked in November 2018 stating that the club inflated the value of the sponsorship agreement, in order to mislead Uefa.
During his testimony before the CAS, the legal representative of the Ministry of Finance in Abu Dhabi claimed that the consortium owned by the club was not related to the government of the United Arab Emirates or the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
