Like the Fairford Five, that British-Iranian dual national has also now been bailed, as suspected terrorists never are. Andy Burnham has had to go along, both with the frequently changing but always fanciful Israeli yarn about Flydubai, and with this preposterous pitch for a filmed farce, Five Lions as the sequel to Four Lions. But the connections between these two false flag operations are not incidental. The war in Iran, by planes flown from RAF Fairford and other nominally British “American forts”, is the cause of the fuel shortage, the fuel shortage has sent through the roof the theft of fuel from farms, and Britain is in that war because we are governed by financial dependents of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Via the acquisition of Manchester City and its use to fund charities and community projects, Sheikh Mansour has effectively acquired the right-wing Labour elite in Greater Manchester. His brother is the Emir of Abu Dhabi, while his wife’s father is the Emir of Dubai. Sheikh Mansour himself controls the UAE National Bank and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, chairs two of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, and sits on the board of a third. Burnham was right the first time. Like rather a lot of things in the United Kingdom, a conurbation of three million people has been made largely dependent on the Emiratis. As Joshi Herrmann, Jack Dulhanty and Alec Herron write:
Earlier this week, just hours after giving a speech to Labour party conference that was praised by pundits and sent party delegates into raptures, Andy Burnham got himself into “perhaps his biggest self inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street,” in the words of the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. Answering a question from Mason about Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners and the financial scandal engulfing the club, Burnham said he would be “really concerned to lose them”, adding: “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester.”
The backlash was swift. “Astonishing, alarming comments,” wrote the veteran football journalist Henry Winter, while government officials told Bloomberg he had risked breaching the government’s neutrality on the case. Downing Street soon saw the need to backtrack. On Thursday, it issued a new statement, this time emphasising that no one could be “above the rules”. Half an hour later, this too had to be amended. “If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences” was replaced with “Wherever wrongdoing is established”.
After all, the independent commission had already found Manchester City guilty “of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules”, including filing misleading accounts and repeatedly creating “sham” contracts that inflated the club’s commercial revenues by over £800 million over nine seasons. The club, several of whose witnesses were accused by the commission of lying during the 12-week hearing, has lodged an appeal.
Burnham’s intervention has drawn unwanted attention to the close ties between Manchester and Abu Dhabi. The media’s whiplash mood shift was best exemplified by the popular News Agents podcast, which went from praising Burnham for delivering “one of the great political speeches” on Tuesday to discussing “Andy Burnham’s dirty political secret” on the following day’s show, asking if his legacy as mayor is “now tarnished by accusations of dirty money”.
But there’s another way of looking at what Burnham said — less as a gaffe than as a rare glimpse of the Mancunian political doctrine that propelled him to Downing Street, but that he has largely expunged from his public platform. You might call it Bernsteinism after Sir Howard Bernstein, the council executive whose commercial genius shaped modern Manchester. You might even say it’s “Real Manchesterism”.
Whatever you call it, it’s the uber-pragmatic model that has held sway in this city since the late 1980s and which says: Manchester’s economic interests trump all other concerns. It has delivered massive overseas investment and has driven the economic growth that Burnham touts in every speech. But it also requires, as local leaders are remembering this week, a very high threshold for embarrassment.
‘You don’t criticise the council’s relationship with the football club’
Back in 2018, a year after Andy Burnham was elected and ten years into Abu Dhabi’s ownership of Manchester City, a small group of staff at Manchester City Council held a strained meeting. It was March 21, and a council officer called Dominic Hayes had just resigned from his role as a director of development and corporate real estate, which he had been doing for just seven months.
Hayes had been assigned to take over various council development projects, and his resignation was surprising and swift. The meeting was designed to work out how the corporate real estate department would operate without a director while a replacement for Hayes was sought. But what made the meeting tense was the letter Hayes sent to the council, outlining his reasons to resign. One of Hayes’ criticisms was particularly awkward: it was about the council’s relationship with Manchester City.
We haven’t seen the letter, but have seen contemporaneous notes from the March 21 meeting, written by a development manager called Gillian Boyle. When we contacted Boyle for comment, she confirmed she remembered the meeting and the notes she took: “I was in the room at the time, I wrote it down in the notes,” she told us. “I thought: ‘hm, this is an important meeting’.”
In the meeting was Eddie Smith, a senior council officer who worked closely with Bernstein and was described by the Manchester Evening News as “the man who helped rebuild east Manchester” when he left the council the following year. According to Boyle’s notes, Smith said in the meeting: “You don’t criticise the council’s relationship with the football club in this organisation and hope to survive.”
Smith denies making the remark and other people who attended the meeting have not responded to our requests for comment. A council spokesperson told us: “We could not comment on a remark allegedly made more than eight years ago.” But the interaction, which has never been reported before, highlights how important – and sensitive – the relationship with Manchester City and its owners had become.
The next year, the Sunday Times revealed that the council had requested that references to “selling out” to the UAE were removed from the text of a performance to commemorate Peterloo, causing an uproar about free speech. By this point, the compromises baked into the city’s economic model were becoming clear.
The deals begin
Leading towards the Etihad Stadium – the headquarters of England’s dominant football club of the past decade and arguably Manchester’s most important international export of that period – is a path named after a man who many fans might not recognise. He’s not a former star like Sergio Agüero or Vincent Kompany, but a former council official who died two years ago.
Sir Howard Bernstein Way is a signal of how unusually intertwined Manchester’s council became with its ascendant football club. During his two decades as chief executive of the council, Bernstein did deal after deal with the club’s owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is a part. After leaving the council in 2017, Bernstein joined the company that owns the club – City Football Group – as an advisor.
Bernstein was not your typical council official. Famed for his commercial nous and eye for a deal, with his heavy gold chains and gravelly voice, he struck some who met him as a private sector wheeler dealer. George Osborne, who worked with him on the devolution deal that transferred powers to Greater Manchester and created the job Andy Burnham would soon occupy, described Bernstein as “one of the towering public servants” of the past half century.
Crucially, he was also a blue. Bernstein was instrumental in the deal that leased the Commonwealth Games stadium to Manchester City, who in turn handed Maine Road to the council for development. The club moved in on a 250-year lease in 2003, but another big deal was to come in 2010, two years after the club was taken over by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Mansour. Bernstein boasted that new terms on the lease would earn the council £4 million a year, up from £2 million the year before. Council officers remember Bernstein going to City’s ground to have breakfast meetings with Marty Edelman, a big shot property lawyer and advisor to the UAE royal family, to discuss the family’s investments.
From the beginning, human rights groups – and some City fans – were critical. In one letter, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International wrote to Manchester’s council leader Sir Richard Leese about the UAE’s imprisonment of “people who criticise its rulers or express a desire for even modest democratic reforms”. (More recently, a New York Times investigation suggested Mansour has supported a paramilitary group accused of committing war crimes in Sudan). But Manchester’s leaders were not put off.
In July 2011 came a commercial deal that still echoes today: the club agreed naming rights with Abu Dhabi’s state-owned Etihad Airways that rebranded not just the stadium but the area surrounding it, now called the Etihad Campus. Leese described the deal as “nothing but good news” for Mancunians, who could now also fly to Abu Dhabi on twice-daily flights operated by Etihad themselves.
Redactions don’t allow us to know for sure, but it is likely to be one of the agreements found to be “shams” by the independent commission in the Premier League case. Its report says Abu Dhabi sponsors paid only a fraction of the deals and Abu Dhabi United Group was filling in the rest, thereby disguising big additional injections of owner cash into City.
Etihad says it is considering legal action against the Premier League for the damage to its reputation – it “categorically rejects any finding, conclusion or implication that suggests the airline has ever been involved in improper commercial arrangements.” But the damage to Manchester’s reputation is also worth considering. After all, if the 2011 deal is among them, a significant chunk of east Manchester was named after a disguised payment.
‘We take people as we find them’
In 2021, speaking to The Mill four years after his retirement from the council, Bernstein uttered a phrase that perfectly captured his doctrine. Asked how a Labour-led council squares its values with doing deals with regimes known for their spotty human rights records, Bernstein answered the question head on. The government deals with international sovereign wealth funds all the time, he said, and those funds want to invest in Manchester. “We take people as we find them.”
So much of Manchester’s approach is bound up in that phrase. Other cities might let their ethical qualms or ideological attachments get in the way of their economic growth. Manchester wouldn’t. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, was Bernstein’s view. But it went further than that. The relationship with Abu Dhabi and other overseas investors – like the Hong Kong-based Far East Consortium behind the £4 billion Victoria North scheme or the Chinese and Australian investors involved in the airport – sprang from determined council efforts to attract money into Manchester. “We bring forward ideas and proposals,” Bernstein said, and no regional city was better at that.
To Bernstein – and to many Mancunians you speak to – the case for this pragmatism was overwhelming. Manchester could never get the level of investment it needed from central government, especially after the financial crash of 2008, so continuing the city’s growth depended on finding massive new pots of money. The pipeline of homes being built in the city centre plummeted from over 4,000 in 2006 to fewer than 500 a year after the crash, according to an estimate from Deloitte. And into the vacuum stepped Mansour and Abu Dhabi, willing to invest in Manchester when previous developers had gone bust and the country was experiencing a period of relative austerity.
In 2014, the council and the Abu Dhabi United Group announced a stunning partnership that extended Mansour’s investment well beyond football. The partnership, called Manchester Life, would build more than 6,000 homes over ten years, and it has been transformative. Walk around New Islington now and many of the people you bump into will be living in Abu Dhabi-funded flats, whether they know it or not.
The council says that Manchester Life has delivered a programme of regeneration worth around £1.25 billion. It points to the building of thousands of homes (though certainly nothing close to 6,000 yet), the preservation of two historic mills and the creation of 30,000 sq ft of commercial space. The new homes are generating much needed council tax revenue, a critical argument for Manchester’s model of handing over large tracts of public land to private companies. A council spokesperson told us that its relationship with the club through the Manchester Life partnership “is no different to any of the multiple joint venture arrangements we have. The success of any partnership is based on its outcomes to bring forward investment in the city, create jobs and deliver homes”.
Around the Etihad, Mansour’s companies have invested hundreds of millions more – in restaurants, stadium development and the Co-op Live arena, of which they own half. All in all, it’s been one of the most dramatic urban transformations anywhere in modern Britain.
Last year, The Mill obtained a long-guarded document that showed Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) was given “Right of first refusal” to council land over a large swathe of east Manchester, including Ancoats, New Islington, Holt Town and the Lower Medlock Valley. Dated 2015, the “Collaboration Agreement” was signed for the council by Bernstein and said the council will from time to time “provide a Land Acquisition Strategy to ADUG for its approval”.
Key sections of the document we obtained were still redacted, and the council has refused to release the full version. Bev Craig, who succeeded Leese as council leader and now Burnham as mayor, was never close to the Abu Dhabi relationship, and both the GMCA and the council say they don’t have any active partnerships with ADUG.
Does the document we published prove that Manchester got too close to Mansour and Abu Dhabi? Defenders of the Manchester model find that suggestion risible. They still feel stung by a study published by researchers at the University of Sheffield a few years ago that meticulously lifted the lid on the Manchester Life partnership and said Manchester had “sold the family silver too cheap”. When The Mill bumped into a local MP and close ally of Burnham’s soon after the Sheffield report was published, they were furious about its critique that the city had taken a wrong turn.
For the Bernsteinists, none of whom – perhaps understandably – wanted to go on the record when we approached them this week, the juice was always worth the squeeze. A former senior council official who was central to the deals with Abu Dhabi told us that he expects his former colleagues to receive a torrent of criticism in the days ahead, and that some of them might reevaluate how they handle such relationships in future. But he stands by the value of the work he did. Jobs and homes will always trump other considerations in the realpolitik of Real Manchesterism.
‘Hope comes from honesty’
Andy Burnham was elected mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, years after the city’s love affair with Abu Dhabi was consummated. And it was the city council, rather than Burnham’s Greater Manchester Combined Authority, who owned the relationship (although it’s notable that several Manchester Life projects received loans from the GMCA’s housing investment fund, including a £24.5 loan six months after Burnham became mayor).
Yesterday, the Liberal Democrats demanded that Burnham disclose all his meetings with City’s owners, but such a list may prove disappointing. None of our reporting over the past six years has turned up evidence that Burnham was partying on yachts with the sheikhs, though of course we’re always happy to be corrected.
Should he and Manchester’s other leaders have twigged earlier that something wasn’t quite right at City? Probably. 18 months after Burnham’s election, hacked emails published by Der Spiegel magazine — the emails that prompted the Premier League investigation — suggested Etihad itself paid only around £8m a year for its sponsorship and that the rest of the £67.5m a year deal was subsidised by ADUG. Did Burnham, a big football fan, not find it odd that a club that had only recently started winning trophies was now claiming to be earning more revenue than Real Madrid? Certainly, many people in the game did.
Whatever he thought then, Burnham now faces a diplomatic headache in his new role as prime minister. Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph reported that the UAE has warned Burnham that it will pull billions of pounds of investments from the UK in retaliation for the guilty verdict against City. Bloomberg revealed that the club’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, who runs one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, met Burnham’s business secretary Jonathan Reynolds in Downing Street just two weeks before the Premier League’s bombshell announcement, at which point Al Mubarak already knew about the outcome. The Department for Business insists that Manchester City was not discussed.
The UAE is one of Britain’s most important overseas partners, with investments in offshore wind, life sciences and our fibre network estimated to run into the tens of billions of pounds. That means men like Mansour and Al Mubarak have serious leverage over our leaders. In his first call as prime minister with the president of the UAE, Burnham thanked his counterpart for the country’s investment in Manchester and its “incredible impact” on the city, according to a Downing Street readout from late July. The next call between the two men is likely to be more challenging.
What the crisis may do is push Burnham to confront a striking contradiction at the heart of his political project. Specifically, it might force him to come out and bat for Real Manchesterism — the very successful, morally compromised, dare-we-say rather neoliberal approach to growing an economy that he inherited from Bernstein and Leese and whose success became his success.
In his conference speech on Tuesday, Burnham said he needed to level with the country. “Hope comes from honesty,” he told the hall. “It comes from saying the things politicians usually avoid.” Burnham’s delivery was brilliant – a reminder of his ability to tell a story and connect emotionally with an audience.
But students of the Manchester economic model might have expected a blunter form of reckoning. When Burnham said, “I have a theory of growth”, there was no mention of how growth in Manchester was driven by making friends in the Gulf or attracting billions from China. When he said, “I intend to take what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth”, he did not confront delegates with the Bernsteinian origin story of that growth: the “partnership” model that gave investors much more influence in urban regeneration than they were granted in other cities.
Burnham now associates growth in Manchester with “public control”, a reference to the Bee Network franchising that was only launched in 2023, two decades after the city’s economy started to take off. In fact, the city cleverly surrendered control to entice outside investors, for example giving Mansour’s company right of first refusal on council land across east Manchester. Burnham talked about “vested interests” and a country with “power held in too few hands”. But no city has been as comfortable handing over public land and public money – think of the GMCA’s repeated loans to Renaker, for example – to a small group, if leaders felt it served their objectives.
If you didn’t know who delivered it, you might assume Burnham’s speech was a repudiation of the Manchester model of economic growth rather than an argument being made by its mayor of almost a decade. You might assume he has overseen a city of mass council house building rather than glassy towers owned by German pension funds and asset managers in Hong Kong, full of private renters.
But before he could make it into the bars of Liverpool to enjoy his ovation, Burnham was yanked back to reality. Asked by the BBC about the cheating scandal on the blue side of Manchester, he momentarily switched back to true doctrine. City’s owners were not cast as sinister “vested interests”, as the speech might have done, but rather a “huge partner in the building of modern Manchester”. He might as well have said: we take people as we find them.
Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi company was given “first offer” over property developments across Manchester under a “sweetheart deal” with the city council. A ten-year contract signed in 2015 gave the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) preferential access to land identified for development by Manchester city council. ADUG owns Manchester City Football Club and has a stake in the Co-op Live Arena — one of the largest indoor arenas in Europe — as well as a number of large apartment blocks in the east of the city. Andy Burnham praised the ADUG as a “huge partner” in the development of the city last week, despite the club being found guilty of inflating revenue and reducing costs by more than £900m, mainly by using money from ADUG to significantly increase the size of their sponsorship deals. The club has lodged an appeal.
The row over Manchester City’s funding has led to wider scrutiny about the scale of ADUG and the UAE’s investments in the UK, particularly Manchester, where Burnham took over as mayor in 2017, two years after the “sweetheart deal” was offered. The 2015 contract, released under freedom of information laws and seen by The Sunday Times, was signed to “promote residential development” by “contributing towards infrastructure provision and land assembly”. The contract stipulated that the council must give “right of first refusal” to ADUG on land the council was planning to sell around Ancoats and New Islington. Under the contract, which ended last year, any agreed development was to be administered via Manchester Life, a joint venture between ADUG and the council.
A council source defended the scheme, noting that Manchester Life “was able to offer a scale of investment that delivered a £1.25bn programme of regeneration” including 1,500 new homes, the preservation of two historic mills, and 30,000 square feet of commercial space, with above-market returns for the council. However, local developers said that the deal hindered their own investments. A major property developer in the northwest of England said: “This is a sweetheart deal between Abu Dhabi and Manchester city council. They are given the red carpet treatment where other British-based developers are not.” The developer added that it “did hold some of us back”.
In July Manchester city council published a review of its deals with private developers which found “weaknesses in documentation, monitoring and assurance” but noted the “significant benefits” delivered. The council’s named contact in the 2015 contract — the existence of which was revealed by The Mill — was Sir Howard Bernstein, its chief executive. After leaving his role in 2017, Bernstein became a strategic development adviser for the parent company of Manchester City. He died in June 2024 at the age of 71. Burnham was the mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, not the city council. Addressing the Manchester City case last week, the prime minister originally said he “would be really concerned” if the club’s owners decided to sell up. He told the BBC: “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester … into the global force that it is.”
However, Downing Street later clarified his comments to stress that Burnham believed “the initial judgment is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules”, saying that “if wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences”. A further clarification followed which replaced the word “if” to “wherever”. The UAE is now said to be threatening to withdraw a major investment worth billions of pounds towards a high-technology hub between Oxford and Cambridge, according to The Telegraph. The Liberal Democrats are calling on Burnham to publish details of any prior meetings with ADUG and declare all hospitality he has accepted at the Etihad Stadium. Manchester City has previously said: “We do not recognise the criticisms linked to the disposal of public land and the idea that there is no financial benefit to the council through this partnership.”
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is warning Andy Burnham that it will pull billions of pounds of investment out of the UK in retaliation for the guilty verdict against Manchester City. The diplomatic row represents a major test of Mr Burnham’s premiership and raises questions over why the Prime Minister praised Manchester City’s ownership in an intervention days earlier. Mr Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, initially said he would be “really concerned” if the UAE decided to sell the football club after the club was found guilty of financial irregularities by the Premier League. He was later forced into a climbdown, with Downing Street insisting no team was “above the rules”.
The Telegraph understands that the UAE is threatening to pull the plug on billions of pounds the Government was seeking in private investment for a hi-tech hub between Oxford and Cambridge, billed as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley. It has emerged that Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the football club’s chairman, met Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, in Downing Street a fortnight before the Premier League announced it had found City guilty of breaking the rules. The Department for Business and Trade insisted the two men did not discuss Manchester City but instead focused on trade, defence and security. Mr Mubarak knew City had been found guilty at the time of the meeting, although the details had not yet been made public.
Details of the meeting have been kept secret, but Emirati officials have separately warned the UK Government that billions of pounds of future investment could now be withdrawn because of the scandal surrounding City. On Friday night, Downing Street said it did not dispute reports that the decision to find City guilty had “undermined” the UAE’s “appetite for future grand-scale UK commitments”. Bloomberg said UAE officials were claiming “the Premier League’s actions” would “have an influence on the bilateral state relationship”. Documents show two senior Labour ministers had courted the UAE in seeking billions of pounds of investment in the scheme to build the hi-tech “corridor” between Oxford and Cambridge. Ministers invited Mr Mubarak’s “partners to visit our Oxford-Cambridge Corridor project”, a letter written on Feb 10 and obtained by The Telegraph under a freedom of information request showed.
Official documents show that Lord Stockwood, then a senior minister, had discussed the Oxford-Cambridge project at a meeting hosted by Mr Mubarak in Abu Dhabi in February. Mr Mubarak, as well as being chairman of Manchester City, is also the chief executive of Mubadala, one of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds which has almost £300bn of assets under its management. “Across life sciences, infrastructure and technologies, there are clear synergies across our strategies,” Lord Stockwood wrote in a letter inviting Mubadala officials to visit the Oxford-Cambridge scheme. Lord Stockwood, a former chairman of Grimsby Town football club, invited Mr Mubarak to visit the team’s home ground. Lord Stockwood, who stepped down as a minister in July following the change of prime minister, declined to comment on claims that Abu Dhabi investment was at risk as a result of the Manchester City scandal.
Reports suggest that in the past five years the UAE has poured more than £30bn into major UK sectors, including defence, life sciences and technology. However, the fallout threatens to derail future deals at a time when the Government is desperate for foreign investment to revive the economy. Rachel Reeves, the former chancellor, had claimed the development of the Oxford-Cambridge corridor could inject £78bn to the UK economy by 2035. The Government has pledged £500m to kickstart the scheme but is seeking £10bn in private investment to get it off the ground. Abu Dhabi is being seen as key to that investment.
The Premier League judgment delivered earlier this week against Manchester City has dealt a major blow to relations. City were found guilty of all but one of 115 charges brought against it. The club was found to have artificially inflated its financial results by more than £900m to circumvent strict rules on clubs’ spending. Potential punishments include a points deduction, heavy fines or possible expulsion from the Premier League. Manchester City’s ultimate owner is Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the UAE’s president, explaining why the finding against City is so damaging to bilateral relations and why the matter is so sensitive.
The crisis is all the more problematic for Mr Burnham, because of his close connections to Manchester, where he was mayor until the summer. In further minutes of meetings held in February in the UAE between Lord Stockwood and senior Abu Dhabi leadership, the Labour minister stressed the importance of both the Oxford-Cambridge corridor and the Northern Growth Corridor, a multi-billion development that includes a multi-billion pound upgrade of rail services between Liverpool, Manchester and east to the North Sea. In the minutes dated Feb 5 this year and which were also obtained by The Telegraph under FoI laws, Lord Stockton promoted the UK’s “unique capabilities” in areas such as research and design and its plans for AI growth. Lord Stockwood met with Sheikh Hamad bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known as HbZ, who runs the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, another of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds with about £900bn of assets under management.
Lord Stockwood separately met Mr Khaldoon to discuss investments through Mubadala, another of the sovereign wealth funds. “JS [Lord Stockwood] noted he wanted to start a conversation, to work both ways on mutual ambitions on investment. JS noted this government is supportive of wealth creation and pro-growth,” noted the minutes. They went on: “JS noted Ox-Cam, and the Northern Growth Corridor to combine the different capabilities of the mayoralties. Investment is one part of this, but knowledge transfer too,” stated the minutes of their meeting. The minutes show Mr Khaldoon specifically boasted of Abu Dhabi’s investment in Manchester and the transformation of the city. “KaM noted they are very proud of what they have achieved through their investments in Manchester,” the minutes read.
Mr Burnham’s intervention in the row between Manchester City and the Premier League prompted widespread condemnation, but may be explained by the pressure being put on the Government by Abu Dhabi. In 2024, the Government blocked an attempted takeover of The Telegraph by RedBird IMI, an Abu Dhabi-backed consortium. The Gulf state has also been credited with the revival of Manchester through huge investment in business and housing projects, which in turn provided a platform for Mr Burnham to launch his bid to replace Sir Keir Starmer in No 10.
Mr Burnham told the BBC on Wednesday: “I would be really concerned to lose them [as owners of Manchester City]. They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester. Obviously, the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is.” He added: “I can’t intervene more in the process,” suggesting he might have already tried to intervene, a claim that has been denied. He then appeared to row back, saying: “I am not getting directly involved in the process.”
Downing Street was then forced to issue a statement stressing that “the initial judgment [against City] is serious and there can’t be any suggestion that anyone is above the rules”. The statement concluded: “If wrongdoing is established, those responsible should face the appropriate consequences.” That statement was subsequently altered to replace the word “if” with “wherever”. The Premier League has found Manchester City guilty of arranging “sham contracts” to disguise payments. City have said they will appeal the Premier League’s findings.
