Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano has said that the club's alleged breaches of UEFA’s financial fair play [FFP] rules are “simply not true” and emphatically denied any wrongdoing.
UEFA, European football’s governing body, announced last week that the reigning Premier League champions would be banned from all UEFA-run competitions for two years and fined the sum of 30 million euros [£25 million].
The punishment was handed out after the independent Adjudicatory Chamber of the Club Financial Control Body [CFCB] adjudged that Manchester City were guilty of contravening break-even rules by over-inflating its sponsorship revenue and submitting “misleading information” to UEFA between 2012 and 2016.
The CFCB verdict also accused City of “failing to cooperate in the investigation” into its financial dealings.
The inquest came about after German newspaper Der Spiegel published leaked documents in November 2018, alleging that Manchester City had inflated the value of one of its sponsorship deals.
Manchester City have fallen foul of UEFA rules before, having been fined £49 million in 2014 for a previous breach of regulations.
The club said in a statement following the latest verdict that it was “disappointed but not surprised” by what it called a “prejudicial” decision, and confirmed that it would lodge an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport [CAS].
Now, chief executive Soriano has denied the allegations.
Soriano said: “The fans can be sure of two things. The first is that the allegations are false.
“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 also believes that the club were “considered guilty every step of the way”, and rebuffed suggestions that the club was uncooperative with the investigation.
He said: “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.
"It was hard because we did this in the context of information being leaked to the media in the context of feeling that every step of the way, every engagement we had, we felt that we were considered guilty before anything was even discussed.
"At the end, this is an internal process that has been initiated and then prosecuted and then judged by this financial fair play chamber at UEFA.”
UEFA has declined to comment.
