Burnham was mayor of Manchester from 2017 until earlier this year and his tenure took place during a sustained period of success for City.<\/p>\n
As mayor, he championed investment from the Gulf as a way of growing Manchester’s economy, a strategy which was initially pursued by the city’s leaders before Burnham became the inaugural elected mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I misspoke,” said Burnham of his past comments on Man City’s owners. <\/p>\n
“What I would say is my mind hadn’t been on all of the issues. My mind had been on Labour Party conference and I was doing interviews in relation to it.<\/p>\n
“And also, I didn’t link those two things. You know, the questions linked those two things. What I would say is they’re very separate.<\/p>\n
“The football issues are different from the investment issues. People will try and conflate those two things, but they shouldn’t, in my view. <\/p>\n
“The football issues, the findings of the independent commission are serious, as I said in the interview.”<\/p>\n
The entire process involving the charges against Manchester City is independent of the Premier League.<\/p>\n
An independent commission held a 42-day hearing in 2024 which led to the verdict announced last month, with City also guilty of all charges except one relating to non-cooperation with the Premier League investigation.<\/p>\n
The commission’s report said that “a number of important club witnesses gave false evidence in key respects and that some knowingly gave untrue and dishonest evidence”.<\/p>\n
A separate independent appeal board will hear City’s appeal. The club continues to deny any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Burnham was mayor of Manchester from 2017 until earlier this year and his tenure took place during a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-799391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}