Manchester City arranged “sham contracts” with a number of its commercial partners as part of a scheme to disguise secret funding of more than £830m, the Premier League says.
The League confirmed that City have been found guilty of all charges related to breaches of Premier League financial rules between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons.
An independent commission found that, during that time period, the club arranged the “sham contracts” as well as “relying on sham agreements to artificially inflate the club’s revenues and reduce its costs”.
The club continues to deny any wrongdoing and have until 2 October to submit an appeal.
News broke last week that City had been found guilty of breaking the majority of the 115 financial rules they were accused of breaching, but on Tuesday the Premier League published a redacted version of the commission’s report.
The commission’s report said the charges “concerned well over 100 alleged individual breaches of Premier League Rules across four broad charge categories”.
It also found the club guilty of all charges except one relating to non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation and said that “a number of important Club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence”.
The sham commercial deals were described as being part of a “disguised funding scheme” to the scale of £830.69m.
City recorded £360m in sponsor fees in the three seasons they won the Premier League – 2011-12, 2013-14, and 2017-18. Only £43m of it was legitimate – the rest came from their owners and was disguised.
“The relevant sponsorship agreements were found to be shams, or at minimum did not reflect their economic substance,” the commission said.
It also describes “deliberate or reckless conduct intended to circumvent the Premier League rules” and that the “sham” scheme devised by City allowed the club “to avoid recording what would otherwise have been the largest single-season loss in Premier League history in 2009-10”.
The commission highlighted the scale of evidence it had to consider by pointing out that the index alone ran to more than 750 pages, while the core bundle of documents “ran to many tens of thousands of pages”.
City are owned by the Abu Dhabi United Group, who took over the club in 2008 and are referred to as “ADUG” in the commission’s report.
In its own statement, the club said: “Manchester City FC is both disappointed and surprised by the opinion of the Premier League Commission, that has been published today.
“The Club is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League and a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence exists in support of all of its positions, relating to this case. The Club will therefore be relentless, and where necessary proactive, in any and all appropriate regulatory and legal forums.
“The Premier League process remains ongoing, with significant elements uncompleted. Manchester City FC will now pursue the appeal avenues open to it, on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe.
“The Club has diligently respected due process for eight years on the basis that the Premier League Board and Executive would behave as an independent, impartial and fair-minded regulator, free from partisan influence.
“The Club is obviously restricted in what it can say further until all future proceedings are complete.”
Manchester City chief executive officer Ferran Soriano declined to comment when approached by BBC Sport but later issued a video message to club staff in which he criticised a “Premier League conspiracy theory” and insisted the club would be “vindicated”.
