Football Leaks: Manchester City accused of using companies in Cayman Islands to conceal player investments

Football Leaks documents outline how Manchester City’s owners may have used a surreptitious company in the Cayman Islands to conceal a player investment fund. The team has been accused of violating UEFA spending rules.

Der Spiegel continues its investigation in big football.

While on the field, the most important weeks of the year are beginning for Manchester City. From a sporting perspective, the team is in fine shape, off the field, however, the club’s leadership is under serious pressure.

“Due to rules violations, the club finds itself facing expulsion from the Champions League. Revelations made public at the end of last year exposed flagrant transgressions by Manchester City. The reports were based on internal documents from the club that were provided to DER SPIEGEL by the whistleblower platform Football Leaks.

The European football association now wants to take a closer look at Manchester City once again. At the same time, there are additional revelations that shed light on the questionable conduct of the club’s directors.

If UEFA is serious about following through on the strict course announced by its president, Aleksander eferin, it has no choice but to impose tough sanctions against the Premier League titan.

In 2014, Manchester City reached a settlement with UEFA to avoid such a penalty. UEFA had discovered violations to its Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules, which prevent club owners from investing unlimited sums of money in their organizations — a club is not allowed to spend significantly more than it earns. Since Manchester was bought by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, though, the club hasn’t made much of an effort to keep its strategy a secret. It has been trying to buy its way to the top of the football world by spending exorbitant sums of money on infrastructure and players — no matter what the cost.

UEFA investigators didn’t believe the club’s assertions that certain sponsors from Abu Dhabi had no connection to the sheikh. They suspected that those companies were also utilized as surreptitious investment vehicles to inflate the club’s revenues.

The club’s boss, Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, said at the time that the settlement felt like little more than a tiny pinch and added that the team would continue pursuing its strategy. Considering the gravity of the accusations facing it, Al-Mubarak’s club had gotten off extremely lightly.

The documents provided by Football Leaks made it clear just how brazen Manchester City was willing to be. Beginning in 2012, the team devised a special construct to systematically circumvent FFP rules, with team executives outsourcing costs to other companies, effectively hiding them from UEFA auditors. If they spent more during a season than intended, they had their sponsors from Abu Dhabi increase the fees they paid to the team and backdated the money transfers to the beginning of the season.

Manchester City has never publicly answered questions about the Football Leaks revelations. Instead, it always provides the same statement, which the club demands be printed in full: “We will not be providing any comment on out of context materials purported to have been hacked or stolen from City Football Group and Manchester City personnel and associated people. The attempt to damage the Club’s reputation is organized and clear.”