February 26 – The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has confirmed it has received Manchester City’s appeal against UEFA’s two-season European ban and €30 million fine.
Having received the ban City immediately vowed to fight the sanctions imposed on February 14 for breaching Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations. CAS has said that there is not possible to give a timescale for the hearings and final awards.
The UEFA sanctions centre around its decision that the club are guilty of “overstating its sponsorship revenue in its accounts and in the break-even information submitted to UEFA between 2012 and 2016” and added that the club “failed to cooperate in the investigation”.
Manchester City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano has denounced allegations of financial fair play “serious breaches” as totally untrue and politically motivated.
“The fans can be sure of two things. The first one is that the allegations are false,” he said. “And the second is that we will do everything that can be done to prove so.”
“The owner has not put money in this club that has not been properly declared. We are a sustainable football club, we are profitable, we don’t have debt, our accounts have been scrutinised many times, by auditors, by regulators, by investors and this is perfectly clear.”
Soriano claimed City were “considered guilty before anything was even discussed… We did cooperate with this process. We delivered a long list of documents and support that we believe is irrefutable evidence that the claims are not true.”
City will now present all that evidence again at CAS, evidence that Soriano says is “irrefutable”.
In explaining its procedure the CAS statement said: “Generally speaking, Cas appeal arbitration procedures involve an exchange of written submissions between the parties while a panel of Cas arbitrators is being convened.
“Once the panel has been formally constituted it issues procedural directions, including, inter alia, with respect to the holding of a hearing.
“Following the hearing, the panel deliberates and then issues its decision in the form of an arbitral award.”
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