Sham City: verdict on financial breaches is damning and punishment must be severe | Jonathan Wilson

How can Manchester City be trusted under these owners after they were found to have devised £900m of ‘sham’ contracts? How bad could it be, really?

How serious can a breach of arcane financial regulations be, really? Just how damning can accountancy be?

Even after Friday’s revelation that Manchester City had been found guilty of all but one of the charges brought against them by the Premier League, it was perhaps difficult to grasp the scale of what that meant.

After the publication of the independent commission’s findings, there can be no doubt: the commission found that Manchester City cheated, that they did so deliberately, and that they have sought to cover that up with a campaign of calculated misinformation.

City continue to maintain their innocence and issued a statement insisting that “the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”.

It referred, once again, to “a comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence that exists in support of all of its positions”, and, again, insisted that “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”.

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