Manchester City could be set to take legal actions against La Liga president Javier Tebas to stop him speaking out against the club, the Mirror is reporting.
City bosses are furious that the 57-year-old Spaniard continues to bad mouth the Blues – despite their success in partially overturning a two-year European ban handed down by UEFA for alleged Financial Fair Play breaches.
And the report claims that City have asked their lawyers for advice on whether they can take action against Tebas.
A senior City source was quoted as saying: “We are aware of what Mr Tebas has been saying in the days since the Court of Arbitration for Sport announced their decision on our appeal.
“The matter has now been referred to our legal team to see if there is a course of action we can take to redress the balance.
“Mr Tebas’ views on the club are without any foundation. An independent body has ruled that UEFA’s decision to ban us from Europe was wrong.
“And the suggestion that we have got off on a technicality is both flawed and damaging to our reputation.”
CAS were scheduled to publish the full details of their findings on Friday.
Both City and UEFA could apply to have those documents kept out of the public domain.
But the word from the Etihad is that City have NOT made an application for the reasons behind the verdict to stay secret.
CAS revealed after their judgement that they could not investigate some claims because they were time-barred by UEFA’s own regulations.
But City are adamant that they had answers to all the allegations – and that they were able to prove that sponsorship deals had not been artificially inflated to boost revenues.
City have been stunned by the backlash to the announcement that UEFA’s ban had been overturned and that a £25million fine had been reduced to £9million over the club’s reluctance to cooperate with an investigation they believed to be wrong.
Borussia Dortmund chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke has claimed the CAS judgement was not based on the evidence presented to them.
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And it is understood that one high-profile TV pundit has been warned by bosses that he was leaving himself open to legal recourse by claiming the club were guilty.
Tebas has been scathing of City’s emergence to threaten established European powerhouses like Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona.
The club wrote to Tebas – himself a qualified lawyer – in the early months of 2019 to ask him to be careful in the language he was using to pour scorn on City and their Abu Dhabi owners.
When he refused to do so, Blues’ chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak described his criticisms as “ethnic slurs” and called Tebas a hypocrite.
Tebas rejected Khaldoon’s accusations of bigotry.
But there is a belief inside the Etihad, that the presence of Catalan Pep Guardiola and several other former Barcelona players and officials gives Tebas another reason to target the Blues.
Guardiola insisted the La Liga chief was “jealous” of the Premier League before the CAS judgement was announced.
And when Tebas spoke out again on Thursday, they instructed their lawyers to act.
Tebas said: “City haven’t signed players with their own resources, like Manchester United do.
“They sign players with petrodollars, with money obtained through oil by the United Arab Emirates.
“The state-owned clubs in Europe do what they want, with fictitious sponsors and naming rights in the case of Man City.”
source:- fcnaija
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