UAE Threatens to Pull Billions in UK Investment After Manchester City’s Guilty Verdict

The United Arab Emirates has warned it could pull billions of pounds of investment out of the United Kingdom in retaliation for the Premier League’s guilty verdict against Manchester City, turning a football disciplinary case into a full-blown diplomatic and economic stand-off, according to The Telegraph.

The Gulf state is said to be prepared to scrap billions of pounds of private investment earmarked for a hi-tech “Silicon Valley-style” hub between Oxford and Cambridge, a project Labour ministers had been courting, The Sun reported. Downing Street did not dispute that the verdict had “undermined” the UAE’s “appetite for future grand-scale UK commitments”.

The warning lands days after an independent commission published its findings on September 29, ruling that Abu Dhabi-owned City had committed serious breaches of the league’s financial rules over a nine-year period, including artificially inflating its results by more than £900 million through what the panel called “sham contracts”. City denies any wrongdoing and lodged an appeal this week.

It also emerged that the club’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, visited Downing Street on September 14 to meet Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in his capacity as chief executive of the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has come under pressure after telling the BBC he would be “really concerned” to lose the club’s owners, an intervention critics called “extraordinary”. A No 10 spokesperson later insisted the process was independent and its outcome “respected”.

The UAE has poured more than £30 billion into British sectors including defence, life sciences and technology over the past five years, with a bilateral investment summit pencilled in for October.

Sources:

• The Sun: https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/40569534/uae-threatens-uk-investments-man-city-sham-deals/
• DailySports (citing The Telegraph): https://dailysports.net/news/economic-warfare-uae-threatens-to-pull-billions-out-of-britain-over-the-city-verdict/
• Foot Africa (citing Bloomberg): http://foot-africa.com/en/news/football-vs-foreign-policy-the-30b-stand-off-between-the-uk-and-the-uae-1373849/