It was late morning on Tuesday April 12, 2011, when a senior executive within the sports sponsorship team at Etihad Airways composed an email to a business contact working in the 'partnerships' department at Manchester City.
It was a month before Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson would win their 19th English top-division league title, surpassing Liverpool's record of 18. Chelsea would be runners-up on 71 points that season, just ahead of City, also with 71.
City, then managed by Roberto Mancini, had extended their wait for a first title since 1968 to 43 years, but with a core of influential players including Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, David Silva, Yaya Toure, Gareth Barry, James Milner and Carlos Tevez — joint winner of the Premier League Golden Boot along with Dimitar Berbatov — they appeared to be knocking on the door of a real renaissance.
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The Etihad exec began their email: 'Dear [XXX] … there seems to be some confusion about an outstanding balance of the sponsorship fee for the 2010/11 season.'
The Mail on Sunday knows the identities of both the sender and the principal recipient of the email but neither works for the same company any more and both moved to different spheres of business.
'As you are aware,' the writer continued, 'Etihad's commitment is for £4million and the remaining balance (£8m) is handled separately by the [UAE] Executive Affairs Authority. Please can you clarify this to your accounts department and pick it up direct with the EAA in due course. Kind regards.'
To put this into context, The Mail on Sunday has been told — and has seen corroborative paperwork — that Manchester City invoiced Etihad for £12m for the 2010-11 shirt sponsorship deal, but the invoice had a hand-written annotation that Etihad themselves were only due to pay £4m that year.
Manchester City invoiced Etihad for £12m for the 2010-11 shirt sponsorship deal - not £4m
Further to that, sources say, and documents show, is that the City-Etihad shirt deal at the time — signed by City's then CEO, Garry Cook, and Etihad's CEO, James Hogan — would cost Etihad £4m in the 2010-11 season, having cost them £3m the season before, and then £4.5m in 2011-12.
The EAA, who were picking up the difference between the headline £12m in 2010-11 and the £4m Etihad were paying, are according to their website 'a specialised government agency mandated to provide strategic policy advice to the Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, His Highness Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces'.
Correspondence seen by the MoS and supported by contemporary paperwork suggests Etihad were not in fact paying the amounts City were invoicing for but a UAE entity serving Sheik Mohamed was.
City have allegedly benefited from abnormally high sponsorship details from entities based in the UAE, in deals that appear to have contravened FFP rules. If money was being funnelled into City to artificially inflate their income for years, that would be a problem.
Etihad were not in fact paying the amounts City were invoicing for but a UAE entity was
And various emails and documents obtained by Football Leaks and/or this newspaper suggest that happened. The Premier League announced an investigation more than two years ago but that has so far been delayed by City's actions in court. City have declined to clarify multiple issues around this.
Fast forward to early summer of 2014 and a source close to City emailed the MoS and claimed that Etihad's 10-year £340m sponsorship with City was not in fact mainly funded by Etihad but rather through Etihad and that a state entity was picking up most of the tab.
Around the same time — and this is when City had just been found guilty of breaking UEFA Financial Fair Play
