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By Tony Attwood

Football is of course a world that lives on rumours. In the summer the media is generally full of little other than international tournaments and transfer rumours - the latter being stories that 97% of the time do not come true. Although yesterday we did find one that was true. See "Wrexham sign Arsenal goalkeeper and give a perfect example of ethical behaviour."

In contrast there is the Manchester City case and it seems some new information is now coming to light.

Until now, because in the background, we have all known that Rui Pinto is still out there and sitting on a huge amount of data. He was the creator of "Football Leaks" who was arrested in 2019 for illegally accessing information and was eventually charged with almost 150 offences in Portugal.

He was found guilty of nine hacking-related offences and got a prison sentence suspended for four years. Now I am not a lawyer (I think I have said that before) but my understanding is that Rui Pinto is now free to release the information he has without any further recriminations.

And it has always been a rumour that among the tens of thousands of documents Rui Pinto got, were a whole load that related to Mancheseter City and in particular their alleged breach of the Financial Fair Play rules.

Of course the fact that this story is running in the Sun and the Mail makes one ponder and wonder a bit more about its accuracy, but the fact is that as part of his plea for leniency in his trial Pinto handed over a lot of incriminating evidence relating to the dealings of some very big clubs including Manchester City. And indeed it was because of this feature of his case that Rui Pinto was put onto a witness protection programme.

At the heart of the information are items concerning the level and sources of revenue of the club, breaches of Uefa and Premier League regulations concerning profitability and sustainability and alleged non-co-operation with Premier League investigations.

So it has long been suggested that Pinto kept hold of most of the documents that he had gained through his hacking activities. And at the heart of the issue this time is the fact that Manchester City have been accused of concealing payments by routing them through third parties and showing straight donations as sponsorship payments.

The Mail reports that Pinto told the OffShore-Alert Marbella Conference via video link: 'The Man City releases showed amounts of money being paid into by the club that were not mentioned to the football authorities."

Now it is often reported that The Court of Arbitratin for Sport has investigated Manchester City and the club was cleared of "disguising equity funds as sponsorship contributions". However that is not quite the full story since the CAS threw out the Uefa case because it was "out of time" - which is to say the case was not brought to court and presented within the two year time limit.

It has been rumoured (although nothing more than rumoured) that Uefa deliberately slowed down the case knowing this would lead to it being thrown out. Of course that remains a rumour but it is a fact that no explanation has been offered as to why Uefa with all its resources took so long to bring the case to CAS. If it wasn't a deliberate ploy by Uefa it was the most extraordinary incompetence on their part. For certainly if Manchester City were not co-operating over the handover of evidence Uefa could have presented that to CAS and got CAS to instruct Manchester City to hand over all documents on pain of being found guilty of all charges if they didn't.

Man City's 115 charges have recently been summarised by the Mail as 54x Failure to provide accurate financial information 2009-10 to 2017-18. 14x Failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009-10 to 2017-18. 5x Failure to comply with UEFA's rules including Financial Fair Play (FFP) 2013-14 to 2017-18. 7x Breaching Premier League's PSR rules 2015-16 to 2017-18 35x Failure to co-operate with Premier League investigations December 2018 - Feb 2023. Of course the formal line from Manchester City is that there is no evidence of substance and they are innocent on all charges. We shall see. Eventually.

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