🇦🇪 Etihad’s Intervention Raises More Questions Than It Answers Etihad Airways is perfectly entitled to defend its reputation. What it cannot do is make the findings of an independent commission disappear simply by objecting loudly enough. Manchester City were found guilty of serious breaches after a lengthy process. The commission concluded that City arranged “sham” contracts with commercial partners, filed misstated accounts and concealed the true state of their finances. Those are findings of FACT, however furiously City dispute them. Now Etihad complains they were never approached, never represented and never given the opportunity to provide information, while considering their legal options. There's an obvious question. If Etihad possessed evidence capable of demolishing the Premier League’s case, why did Manchester City’s formidable legal team apparently not call them as witnesses during the 12-week hearing? City have spent years promising “irrefutable evidence”. Their chief executive Ferran Soriano has now described the case as a “conspiracy theory”. Etihad has entered the argument. Sheikh Mansour’s brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, chairs the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund which owns Etihad. At some point the impression of entirely separate actors becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Then we have Andy Burnham. The PM says he must “keep my distance” because this is an independent legal process. Yet in almost the same breath he publicly thanked City’s ownership for its investment in Manchester and said he would be “really concerned” to lose them. That is a peculiar interpretation of keeping your distance. I’ll be charitable and call it ignorance rather than stupidity. By attempting to say nothing about the process, Burnham managed to say something rather revealing about the wider problem. Money brings influence. Influence brings powerful friends. And when an independent commission finally says the rules were broken, suddenly an extraordinary number of influential people seem desperately interested in reminding everyone how valuable the accused have been. Maybe, just maybe, sovereign state-linked ownership of sporting institutions was never the best idea.