Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first public instinct, after an independent commission found Manchester City Football Club guilty of more than 100 charges, was to worry about losing the owners. “I would be really concerned to lose them,” the former Mayor of Greater Manchester told the BBC. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad [Stadium] and the campus around it but also into the city.”
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The commission found a conspiracy to inflate revenues and hide costs between 2009 and 2018, by more than £900 million, largely through what it called sham commercial deals. City denies wrongdoing and has appealed. Etihad, the shirt and stadium sponsor, has threatened to sue the league. Number 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, then issued a statement saying “if wrongdoing is established” there should be consequences.
The Paper Trail.
City’s line for years has been that the club is not state-owned. On paper, that is correct. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan holds the majority through Newton Investment and Development, a private company registered in Abu Dhabi. He is also Deputy Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and half-brother of the UAE’s ruler, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak runs Mubadala, a sovereign fund with $385 billion under management. He chairs the Executive Affairs Authority, which advises the president, and sits on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. In 2020, he was granted British diplomatic immunity. When Burnham’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, landed in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in April for talks on the Strait of Hormuz, Al Mubarak was the official who met him on the runway.
In the early years of the ownership, Al Mubarak told The Guardian there was “almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi,” and that “how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are.”
There is a Burnham-Manchester-UAE scandal brewing about this Abu Dhabi-Man City stuff.
As people find more out about the scale of corruption by Man City's owners, they'll also learn of the "sweetheart deals" handed to them in Manchester.
Watch this space.
— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) October 4, 2026
The Contract Burnham Worked Under.
Burnham did not negotiate the land deal. The deal was with Manchester City Council, not the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which he later led. That is the defense. The dates still run through his mayoralty.
In December 2015, the council and Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) signed a ten-year collaboration agreement, described by critics as a “sweetheart” deal. It gave ADUG right of first refusal on council land around Ancoats and New Islington. Agreed schemes went through Manchester Life, a joint venture set up in 2014. The council’s named contact was Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive from 1998 to March 31, 2017. The contract ended in 2025.
Burnham became mayor on May 8th, 2017. He was automatically disqualified from the role on June 19th, 2026, when he returned to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament (MP) for Makerfield as part of a successful bid to oust Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. He was appointed Prime Minister on July 20th. For eight of the ten years the first-refusal contract was live, he was the elected face of the city-region whose growth story depended on it.
A 2022 University of Sheffield report, Manchester Offshored, said the council “sold the family silver too cheap”: 999-year leases, prices below some comparable plots, rental, and sales income sitting with ADUG-linked entities in Jersey. The Sunday Times later called Manchester the city that “sold out” to Abu Dhabi. The council says independent valuers were used, market interest was thin, and the return was the best available. External auditors last year found weaknesses in the joint ventures, particularly on overage—the extra payments due to the council when land values rose.
The Friend Who Changed Sides.
Bernstein was the officer who, with council leader Sir Richard Leese, drove the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Metrolink, and the Devo Manc deals that created the mayoralty Burnham won.
In November 2017, months after leaving the council, he was appointed strategic development adviser to City Football Group. City Football Group announced it. The job put him on the board of Eastlands Strategic Development Company, the council–ADUG joint venture for the Etihad Campus. He was already honorary president of the club. He died in June 2024.
Burnham’s tribute to Bernstein after his death was intimate. “I am privileged to have known and worked with Sir Howard since I was first elected to Parliament in 2001,” he said. “I had total admiration for his tenacity in representing his city and its residents, and always valued his counsel and friendship.” He called him “the architect of modern Manchester.”
Crucially, the public record shows a straight line. The named contact on the first-refusal contract retired from the council and, within the year, was paid to develop the same ground for the buyer, while the mayor who called him a friend ran the city-region.
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Burnham Wants the Site.
The i Paper reported on October 4th that land covered by the first-refusal deal includes the former Central Retail Park in Ancoats, the proposed long-term home of Burnham’s “Number 10 North,” a satellite office of 10 Downing Street the Labour leader is establishing in Manchester. The council bought the 10.5 acres in 2017 for £42.35 million, then its most expensive land purchase, and earmarked it for Manchester Life flats. ADUG and the council each put in £750,000. The scheme never happened, but under the council could not offer the land to other partners under the terms of the deal. It sat largely empty for about a decade.
The plot Burnham wants as a northern seat of government is still ground the owners had locked, under a contract his friend signed, during the years he was mayor.
The Shareholders.
Burnham’s conference pitch is that he will take “what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth,” and drive it into every postcode. In the same speech, he said he was tired of a world where “shareholders never lose” and “the public never win.”
Yet The Guardian has reported that of 10,974 homes built in the Greater Manchester region in the nine years to 2024, 679—six percent—were classed as affordable. The first-refusal contract gave the shareholders the option. The public got a profit-share the council defends and the Sheffield academics called cheap.
On October 1st, Tax Policy Associates said the commission’s findings and leaked documents point to about £12 million in unpaid British tax on payments to former manager Roberto Mancini, routed through a consultancy the commission treated as a sham. With interest and penalties, the same note puts the bill nearer £23–24 million, and says knowingly false accounts may imply Companies Act offenses. That estimate was published in the same week Burnham thanked the ownership.
No Transparency.
Burnham has said his dealings as mayor would “of course” stand up to scrutiny. The Liberal Democrats, a rival left-wing party to Labour, have asked him to publish every meeting and conversation with City Football Group, Abu Dhabi United Group, and UAE representatives, and every piece of Etihad hospitality received during his mayoralty. He has not.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds met Al Mubarak in person within the past month. A government source said the City verdict was not discussed. The Foreign Office has previously refused to release correspondence on the charges because disclosure could harm relations with the UAE.
The question is why a Prime Minister who says shareholders should stop winning opened the week of a guilty verdict by thanking these ones, and why the meetings from nine years as mayor are still unpublished.
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