The Al Nahyan family deserves scrutiny for a family member’s videotaped torture and the crimes documented within the security system it governs. In Britain, its football investment gives ministers a more comfortable subject. An independent commission has found serious financial misconduct at Manchester City, the club has exercised its right of appeal and the prime minister has expressed concern about losing its owners, and yet the political discussion already asks what Britain might lose by enforcing rules that every club was expected to obey. The family governs in Abu Dhabi and owns a club whose success has made its money welcome in England.
On September 29, the Premier League published findings covering nine seasons, from 2009-10 to 2017-18. Its statement says the commission found sham commercial agreements, misstated accounts and concealed owner funding, with revenue inflated and costs reduced by more than £900 million. Sponsorship counterparties supplied part of the recorded fees; Abu Dhabi United Group, the ownership vehicle, supplied the balance. The commission also upheld most of the charges concerning failure to cooperate. The findings concern breaches of sporting rules and remain subject to appeal.
The accounting mechanism allowed owner support to appear as commercial income, enlarging the revenue against which spending could be assessed. An independent customer paying for exposure and an owner subsidising his own club represent different economic relationships. If the second is recorded as the first, the accounts give regulators a distorted picture of the business’s capacity to support its costs. The sponsor’s name supplies the commercial appearance while the owner supplies the money, and the club acquires spending capacity that its published income attributes to someone else.
You can recognise the quality of City’s football without accepting the accounts that financed the squad. Players performed real work, coaches made consequential decisions and supporters experienced victories that belong to their lives. Financial misconduct changes the conditions under which that success was assembled. Supporters neither negotiated the contracts nor certified the accounts, and their memories of winning seasons cannot establish where the sponsorship money came from. The ownership must answer for its transactions without using the people who love the club as its defence.
The sponsor and the supplier
Paul Quinn’s published analysis puts recorded Abu Dhabi sponsorship income at £949.94 million across the period, comprising £119.25 million attributed to sponsors and £830.69 million attributed to Abu Dhabi United Group. The ownership vehicle supplied almost seven pounds for every pound attributed to the sponsors, while the accounts recorded the income through commercial relationships. The calculation identifies who supplied the sponsorship money.
The commission’s published decision followed a 42-day hearing in late 2024, with expert evidence covering Abu Dhabi governance as well as accounting and sponsorship. Its account of the proceedings describes approximately 7,000 pages of witness transcripts. The tribunal acknowledged the burden of disclosure on City and the delay in producing its decision. A finding reached through that process deserves scrutiny on its reasons, including any errors the appeal establishes. It also deserves a better answer than the suggestion that successful investment should place the underlying transactions beyond examination.
City announced on October 2 that it had filed its appeal at 7 p.m. on October 1. The club says the decision contains material errors of law, principle and fact, maintains its innocence and asserts that evidence supports its positions. That defence must be assessed through the appeal process. As of this editorial’s date, punishment remains a separate stage. The owner’s diplomatic importance cannot supply an additional ground of appeal, and public anger cannot supply the tribunal with a substitute for proof.
The appeal board must answer City’s allegation of material errors, and a successful challenge would change the findings on which this account rests. The prime minister’s concern about losing the owners belongs outside that decision. City can challenge the evidence and the commission’s application of the rules; the commercial value of its owners gives it no further entitlement. Otherwise a club backed by a government acquires a political defence unavailable to opponents whose owners cannot offer ministers an investment partnership.
In 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned City’s two-season UEFA exclusion and reduced its fine from €30 million to €10 million. Some allegations were not established and others were time-barred; a penalty for failure to cooperate remained. City was entitled to the benefit of that judgment. The Premier League case concerns findings made under its own rules, which its appeal board must now examine on their merits. Treating the earlier victory as a permanent certificate of compliance would be as careless as treating the present decision as immune from challenge.
The owner’s public office
Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the UAE’s vice president, deputy prime minister and chairman of the Presidential Court. His brother, Mohamed bin Zayed, is president. Mansour holds authority over public institutions while his family governs Abu Dhabi and occupies the highest levels of the federal state. British ministers know those offices belong to the man whose investment they welcome.
Corporate separation can establish which entity signed a contract, incurred a debt or owes a duty to a regulator. It cannot remove the public offices from the political assessment of the person who owns the business. An owner who holds state authority brings relationships unavailable to an ordinary investor. The distinction between private capital and state power therefore needs to be demonstrated transaction by transaction, through control and responsibility, rather than accepted whenever separation is convenient and abandoned whenever diplomatic importance offers protection.
Football ownership gives that power an audience abroad whose attachment was formed before the investment arrived. A supporter inherits a team through family, neighbourhood and years of attendance. The owner acquires a business that already contains those relationships, and investment can improve the football while attaching the investor to the resulting gratitude. Local gains are real. Their political use begins when the benefits are presented as reasons for officials to fear enforcing the rules against the institution that delivered them.
Britain can accept investment without accepting the investor’s entire political record. Commercial exchange between states depends on that possibility. The difficulty comes when the separation works in only one direction: overseas conduct is excluded from discussion of the investment, while the investment is admitted as a reason to soften discussion of overseas conduct. The family receives the advantages of a private commercial identity and the influence of public authority, and yet British institutions are encouraged to treat each encounter as if it concerned a different, disconnected actor.
The ownership and public offices belong to identifiable people. Emirati citizens do not collectively own City, migrant workers do not decide the UAE’s security relationships, and Dubai has a different ruling family from Abu Dhabi. A family-centred inquiry follows documented offices and ownership rather than treating nationality as evidence. It also distinguishes responsibility for a football contract from responsibility for a military operation. Combining those questions politically requires precision about the links; combining them legally requires evidence of the acts attributed to each person.
The torture on camera
Mohammed Shah Poor, an Afghan grain dealer, survived the abuse that brought Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan to international attention. In April 2009, Human Rights Watch described video evidence of Issa and police beating Poor, using electric cattle prods and driving over him. Its account placed the attack in October or November 2004. Poor spent months in hospital with broken bones and internal injuries. A member of the ruling family was on camera and police assisted him, and yet the Interior Ministry initially described an assault settled privately and said the police had followed their procedures.
The Interior Ministry treated a private settlement as an answer to filmed violence and certified the conduct of police who had assisted a royal. Poor’s broken bones remained. The ministry’s account addressed how the dispute had been closed while HRW demanded an investigation of the attack and the officers’ role. A police procedure that permits assistance in torture protects the perpetrator at the point where the victim should be able to seek protection from him.
Issa pleaded not guilty and was acquitted in January 2010 of charges relating to the abuse. HRW criticised the secrecy surrounding the proceedings and called for an independent inquiry into torture by security personnel and people in authority. The acquittal settled the charges before that court. It did not erase the footage or answer HRW’s demand for an account of how police had participated in the attack and how the ministry had reviewed their conduct.
A ruling family’s responsibility extends to the institutions through which violence is investigated or excused. The Issa case provides direct evidence concerning a family member; Yemen and Sudan require separate examination of state agencies, contractors and assistance to armed forces. Criminal responsibility attaches to identifiable acts and people. Political responsibility also attaches to the authority that controls the system, appoints its leadership and answers for its conduct. British ministers who celebrate that family’s investment cannot reasonably treat those responsibilities as an intrusion into the relationship they have chosen to promote.
The Malaysian record
In May 2020, the US Justice Department announced a civil forfeiture settlement covering more than $49 million in assets acquired by Khadem al-Qubaisi, the former managing director of Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company. The department said its complaints alleged that more than $4.5 billion had been misappropriated from Malaysia’s development fund, 1MDB, between 2009 and 2015. An executive entrusted with a state investment institution had become the subject of proceedings to recover assets traced to another country’s public money.
A separate complaint describes approximately $1.367 billion from two 2012 bond issues being diverted to a Swiss account belonging to Aabar Investments PJS Limited, a British Virgin Islands company whose name resembled that of a legitimate IPIC subsidiary. Prosecutors alleged that al-Qubaisi and Mohamed al-Husseiny opened the account and used it to divert funds. The company name made the destination look institutionally credible. The inquiry depended on identifying the actual entity behind the name and the authority exercised by the people moving the money.
Malaysia had established a fund for development, borrowed money through international markets and entered relationships carrying the standing of a major foreign investment institution, and yet prosecutors traced substantial funds to an offshore company bearing a deceptively familiar name. The Malaysian public’s claim to that money survived the paperwork. A bond’s repayment obligation does not disappear because its proceeds have been diverted, which is why the source, destination and authorised purpose of each transfer belong in the same account. Public liabilities and private acquisitions cannot be assessed as unrelated outcomes.
In January 2019, al-Qubaisi told The Wall Street Journal from an Abu Dhabi prison that senior UAE officials knew about IPIC’s 1MDB dealings and that he was being made a scapegoat. Malaysiakini’s account of the interview reported his allegation that authorities were pressing him to surrender property to Das Holding, described as a private company owned by Mansour. An Abu Dhabi lawyer involved in the case told the Journal that al-Qubaisi had exceeded his authority for personal gain. Al-Qubaisi was defending his conduct from prison; the lawyer placed responsibility on him. Neither account resolves what senior officials knew.
The complaint and interview establish no criminal finding against Mansour. They do place an investment institution, a senior executive and claims involving his private company within a record that his football achievements cannot answer. The relevant political questions concern supervision, the boundary between institutional authority and personal business, and the treatment of recovered assets. Britain accepts capital from institutions whose standing rests on public authority; it therefore has reasons to examine how that authority was exercised when Malaysian development money disappeared. Familiarity acquired through a football club supplies no substitute for that examination.
El Fasher and the Presidential Court
On February 19, 2026, the UN’s independent fact-finding mission reported that the RSF’s campaign against non-Arab communities in and around El Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide. The city had fallen in October 2025 after a prolonged siege. The mission’s conclusion concerns a campaign of destruction directed at communities, including the Zaghawa and Fur. Abu Dhabi’s partners must account for their dealings with institutions accused of assisting the perpetrators.
Human Rights Watch’s May 25 investigation traced Colombian fighters’ recruitment through Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group, travel through UAE military facilities and deployment alongside the RSF. It verified videos placing contractors in El Fasher. Citing corporate research by The Sentry, HRW reported that GSSG was founded by Ahmed Mohammed al-Humairi, secretary general of the Presidential Court, which Mansour chairs. HRW expressly says the connections do not establish that the named officials knew about or participated in the Colombian deployment. The UAE disputes the evidence of its support for the RSF.
Investigators have a company founded by a Presidential Court official and contractors who travelled through military facilities. They need the authorisations. Who approved access, who paid for transport and who issued the deployment instructions would determine how far responsibility extends through the state. HRW’s account gives grounds to pursue those records, while its express qualification prevents a corporate connection from being passed off as proof that Mansour ordered the operation. The family’s public offices make the inquiry necessary; evidence of each official’s conduct must determine its conclusions.
City’s sponsorship accounts establish no financial route to RSF operations. The political relationship concerns a family that receives prestige through English football while rights investigators examine security activity linked to institutions within its state. British ministers have responsibilities beyond the league’s jurisdiction. A football tribunal can determine compliance with sporting rules, while government can examine military assistance, export risks and diplomatic representations. The separation of those tasks becomes an excuse only when each institution’s limited remit is used to leave the wider relationship unexamined.
In July, HRW’s Jean-Baptiste Gallopin criticised France’s silence over the UAE’s role and called for suspended arms deliveries and European sanctions. He also noted that France, Britain and other European states had expressed concern about external support without naming the UAE. Governments can condemn assistance in general terms while preserving their relationship with the state accused of supplying it. Public concern then imposes little pressure on the institutions whose conduct needs to change.
Arms scrutiny must follow the equipment from export permission to possession on the battlefield. A weapon’s presence requires examination of its buyer, subsequent transfers and compliance with the conditions attached to the sale. That work also tests the supplier’s response after evidence of diversion becomes available. The RSF has taken a city and investigators have documented targeted destruction and traced foreign contractors, and yet governments dealing with Abu Dhabi can still choose language that conceals the identity of the partner whose conduct they need to confront. Their diplomatic discretion has consequences for people excluded from those negotiations.
The contracted security state
The Yemen record predates the present football findings by years. In 2017, Associated Press reporter Maggie Michael documented at least 18 secret detention sites in southern Yemen controlled by the UAE or allied forces, with accounts of torture. The UAE denied operating secret prisons or torturing detainees. The reporting also forced American officials to acknowledge that US interrogators had questioned detainees from the prisons. An overseas security partnership had created custody arrangements whose consequences extended beyond the forces guarding the sites.
In September 2021, the US Justice Department announced deferred prosecution agreements with three former American intelligence or military personnel who provided hacking services to the UAE. They admitted conduct violating US export-control and computer laws and agreed to pay a combined $1,685,000, alongside restrictions on future activities and employment. The agreements required cooperation. The personnel admitted offences and accepted penalties while their foreign client retained its strategic relationships.
Reputational attacks were also contracted abroad. Mediapart and European Investigative Collaborations reported in October 2023 that Alp Services had supplied UAE intelligence services with the names of more than 1,000 people and more than 400 organisations in 18 European countries, presenting them as linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The reporting found many designations inaccurate. The French targets included former presidential candidate Benoît Hamon and the National Centre for Scientific Research. A respected public research institution could become a supposed Islamist connection in a private firm’s material for a foreign intelligence client.
The American hacking agreements identify hired personnel who admitted offences; the Alp Services reporting identifies a private firm supplying material to UAE intelligence. In both cases, examining the contractor brings the client into view. Contracts and payments can establish who bought the service and what the supplier was asked to do. British ministers promote business with Abu Dhabi in the language of identifiable projects and benefits. The same precision is required when examining the security services purchased by the state whose investment they welcome.
The minister and the investor
On September 16, 2021, the British government announced a £10 billion UAE commitment through the sovereign investment partnership overseen by its Office for Investment and Mubadala. The arrangement covered technology, infrastructure, energy transition and life sciences. In April 2026, the UAE foreign ministry said nearly £30 billion had been committed across more than 50 direct investments. The later figure is the investor government’s account of commitments, rather than an independent audit of completed spending.
A commitment can shape political expectations before all the money has arrived. A minister anticipating projects has reasons to preserve the relationship, while businesses expecting contracts can add their own pressure. Completed investments also create real interests through employment and infrastructure. Ministers need to disclose how much money has arrived and which decisions depend on further investment. Otherwise a promised benefit can acquire the political force of money already spent, and uncertainty about future capital becomes a reason to tolerate conduct that the government would condemn in a less valuable partner.
After the City findings, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he would be concerned if the Abu Dhabi owners sold the club and credited them with helping build modern Manchester. Downing Street subsequently stressed the seriousness of the findings and said City was not above the rules. The clarification stated a defensible principle; the earlier remarks disclosed the political cost the prime minister attached to its enforcement. Neither statement proves interference in the tribunal, but together they make disclosure of relevant government contacts necessary.
The unresolved question is what representations British ministers have received from Abu Dhabi about City’s punishment. A public record of relevant meetings and correspondence would establish whether ministers discussed the case, which interests were presented and what commitments were made. Legitimate diplomatic contact can survive publication. Confidential pressure becomes harder to assess when the government asks the public to accept both its attachment to the owners and its assurance that the rules will operate without political influence.
The Treasury Committee has already pursued one question outside the league’s jurisdiction. Its chair, Dame Meg Hillier, wrote to HMRC permanent secretary JP Marks asking about the tax implications of the findings, including arrangements used to conceal staff liabilities, and whether HMRC had sought an unredacted decision. A sporting breach can raise questions for other authorities without predetermining their answers. Government’s separate responsibilities include military assistance and export conditions. Each institution can investigate the conduct within its powers while ministers disclose the contacts through which the ownership’s interests were presented.