The United Arab Emirates has warned it could suspend major investments in Britain following Manchester City’s conviction on financial rule breaches by an independent Premier League commission, according to reports.
Emirati officials said the Premier League’s actions would “have an influence on the bilateral state relationship,” Bloomberg reported. The Telegraph said the UAE is threatening to pull a multibillion-pound investment in a planned Silicon Valley-style technology hub linking Oxford and Cambridge.
An independent commission last month upheld 114 of 115 charges brought by the Premier League against City for breaches of financial rules between 2009 and 2018. The panel described the club’s activities as a “sham” on multiple occasions and said some of its witnesses had been “dishonest.”
The commission found City arranged “sham” commercial deals with sponsors as part of a disguised funding scheme in which companies paid only a portion of the fees, with the remainder covered by Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development Ltd, which owned the club.
City has appealed the verdict, stating the ruling contained “clear material errors of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.” The club insisted a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions.”
City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak met Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in Downing Street two weeks before the Premier League announced the decision, the Telegraph reported.
On Thursday, Downing Street described the guilty verdict as “serious.” The statement followed comments by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who said he would be “really concerned” if the current owners sold the club.
“They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester, obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is,” Burnham told the BBC. He added that he thanked the City Football Group “for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad and the campus around it but also into the city.”
Conservative shadow sport minister Louie French accused the government of “publicly backing the owners,” calling the intervention “frankly extraordinary.”
