Filings at Companies House show that Sheikh Mansour’s Newton Investment and Development bought 11,327,163 newly issued shares in City Football Group on 14 October, injecting the £100m into the parent company two weeks after the Premier League’s independent commission found the club guilty on all but one of the 115 financial charges.
Ferran Soriano went public with the club’s rebuttal at the same time. In a statement reported by Yahoo Sports, the chief executive said the entire case rests on one claim he insists is false, that owner money was secretly fed into the club through Abu Dhabi sponsorships.
“This has gone for so long that it is important to remind ourselves that the whole Premier League case against us is based on a single false accusation,” Soriano said.
He added that the central allegation, that the owners’ personal money was funnelled into the club via Abu Dhabi sponsors, is “just not true”.
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Soriano points to the 2020 CAS reversal
Soriano framed the appeal as a fight the club has won before, pointing to the 2020 Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling that overturned UEFA’s two-year European ban. He told Yahoo Sports the club had also been “wrongly ruled against” in that case before winning on appeal to CAS.
City lodged its formal appeal on 1 October, within the Premier League’s deadline, arguing the ruling “contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe”. A separate independent panel will hear the appeal, with sanctions decided only after that process concludes.
Commission cites £830m overstated income and ‘sham’ sponsorships
The commission’s findings, confirmed on 29 September, covered an eight-season window from 2009 to 2018. The panel ruled that City used “sham” sponsorship contracts as part of a disguised funding scheme and that the club’s reported income over the period was “hugely overstated by over £830m”.
No points deduction, fine or expulsion has yet been imposed. Those decisions sit with a separate sanctions panel expected to sit in the coming weeks.
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Soriano, speaking to European club executives in Copenhagen, warned peers that the full process still has “a lot more time” to run, per ESPN. Any sanctions issued by the first panel are expected to be stayed or complicated by the appeal.
£100m in equity, not a loan
The 14 October share allotment is equity, not debt. A City Football Group spokesperson described the money as “equity from our largest shareholder” that “will be used for normal corporate purposes against our strategic plans, funding planned investments into the City Football Group”, according to City AM.
City Football Group, which owns Manchester City, Girona, Palermo, New York City FC and Melbourne City among others, is valued at just under £6bn. The share issue marginally increases Mansour’s majority holding in the parent company.
The sanctions panel is expected to convene in the coming weeks, and the appeal is scheduled to run alongside it through the rest of the 2026-27 Premier League season.
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