Andy Burnham’s ties to Manchester City’s controversial Emirati owner Sheikh Mansour

Andy Burnham had more than £30 million worth of reasons to be fully focused as he climbed the front steps of Trafford’s grand Victorian town hall shortly before 10.30am on Friday, September 29, 2017.

The then-mayor was preparing to chair the monthly meeting of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), where members were due to consider a major financial decision.

The authority, whose voting membership was made up almost entirely of Labour councillors, had to decide whether to approve £31.2 million in taxpayer-backed loans for two property companies: New Little Mill and Vesta Street.

Burnham would presumably have known that both firms were owned through Jersey, a tax haven, by Sheik Mansour Bin Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. The immensely wealthy Emirati politician also owned Manchester City football club. The companies wanted to use the loans to develop upmarket apartments in Ancoats, the canalside district north of Manchester city centre known for its former cotton mills and warehouses.

Why one of the world’s richest men, with an estimated fortune of as much as £30 billion — nearly 1,000 times the value of the loans — required public money for a speculative housing project remains unclear. That, however, is a question for another day.

What matters here is that, at the time of this crucial meeting, Andy Burnham and Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi-linked leadership were on notably friendly terms.

Just weeks earlier, on August 21, the then-mayor had accepted a complimentary ticket from City chairman and close business associate of Sheik Mansour, Khaldoon Al Mubarak. The invitation allowed Burnham to watch his beloved Everton at the Etihad Stadium in a Premier League match. They had dinner together in an executive box before moving to padded light-blue seats to watch an entertaining 1-1 draw.

Only six weeks after accepting the £330 hospitality package, Burnham was due to chair a meeting that would decide whether public money should be loaned to property companies linked to his host.

Was the apparent conflict of interest declared at the September 29 meeting? It was not. The official minutes record that, with Burnham presiding, the GMCA resolved to provide New Little Mill and Vesta Street with £10.5 million and £20.7 million respectively. The administration’s financial support did not stop there.

A month later, the Labour mayor chaired another GMCA meeting, this time at Manchester’s Lowry Theatre. Members agreed to lend a further £24.5 million to Lampwick Developments Limited, a third company whose ultimate beneficial owner was listed as Sheik Mansour.

The following spring brought another social meeting between Burnham and the city’s Abu Dhabi-connected benefactors. This time, he and Al Mubarak dined together in an executive box before the Manchester derby.

A month after that £700 hospitality package, the Emirati-linked club extended its generosity once again, offering two tickets to an Ed Sheeran concert at the stadium, valued at £150. The relationships were deeply intertwined. In Burnham’s Manchester, critics argued, a one-party political culture made personal connections almost as important as business expertise in the property world.

Now, almost nine years on, the consequences of that unusual sequence of events are beginning to draw renewed attention. With Burnham now in Downing Street, the details of his mutually beneficial relationship with Manchester City and its Middle Eastern owner are finally receiving national scrutiny.

At the heart of the story is a stark development: the football institution once so close to the Labour Prime Minister is now engulfed in a major controversy after being found guilty last month of systematically and cynically breaching Premier League rules.

Even by the often controversial standards of professional football, the scale of Manchester City’s alleged wrongdoing is extraordinary.

An independent commission found that the club had breached financial regulations 114 times over nine years, from 2009 to 2018. During that period, when City won three league titles, it was found to have used “sham” contracts to channel £830 million into its football operations in secret.

The penalties have yet to be announced. Manchester City, which denies wrongdoing, has pledged to appeal while declining to discuss the details of the alleged breaches. The claims first came to light through computer files leaked in 2018.

As for Andy Burnham, his response has been a masterclass in political ineptitude, elevating what was previously a footballing controversy into the growing stench of a political scandal.

The Prime Minister’s first foot-in-mouth moment came hours after news of the independent findings broke, on September 25.

In two interviews, he chose neither to condemn the club, nor to give a statesmanlike refusal to comment but, instead, gave two ill-advised TV interviews where he effectively parroted Man City’s house PR line, to the effect that it shouldn’t yet be regarded as guilty.

An initial chat with Granada saw the Prime Minister push back on suggestions that the club should be punished via demotion from the Premier League, saying ‘people shouldn’t jump to those kinds of conclusions’ and describing the whole thing as ‘quite a contested process’.

A second, to the BBC, saw him declare it ‘frustrating when people rush to judgment’ (an odd way to describe a forensic investigation that had taken some eight years) before adding that he hoped City’s owners didn’t sell the club. ‘I would be really concerned to lose them,’ said Burnham. ‘They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester.’

Among those who thought his remarks smacked of partisanship was City fan Liam Gallagher, who (perhaps unhelpfully) welcomed the PM’s comments, posting on X: ‘There’s only 1 ANDY BURNHAM. I told ya. Friends in high places.’

Questions over Burnham’s links to Abu Dhabi duly began to mount, amid news that Al Mubarak had visited Downing Street on September 14, barely a fortnight before news of the findings against Man City broke.

The Emirati was given red-carpet treatment during the visit, when he was met by one of Burnham’s special advisers and whisked past security before sitting down for a chat with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds. A scheduled audience with Burnham, which had been in the PM’s diary for some time, was only cancelled at the last minute because of the fact that his father, Roy, had died that day.

It also emerged that in July, a few days after taking office, Burnham had spoken by phone with Abu Dhabi’s absolute monarch, Crown Prince Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of Sheik Mansour.

According to the official record of their conversation, the Prime Minister ‘began by thanking His Highness for his country’s investment into Manchester and the incredible impact it has had on the city’.

That ‘investment’ is now firmly under the spotlight, amid extraordinary revelations about the various alleged ‘sweetheart’ deals that Sheik Mansour’s property firms had negotiated with Manchester’s city council.

A particularly remarkable example, which seems entirely at odds with normal public procurement practices, saw the Emirati investor given a ten-year ‘right of first refusal’ to swathes of land the council was planning to sell between the Etihad Stadium and the city centre.

An array of valuable real estate was duly sold to his firms without first being offered to the market via a transparent tendering process. Planning applications on the land were rushed through, while rules that usually require developers to make 20 per cent of their properties ‘affordable’ were torn up.

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Manchester council has said these measures were needed to encourage investment in a deprived part of the city, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. But that view is not universally shared. Indeed, a scathing 2022 report by Sheffield University emerged from the woodwork, concluding that Manchester had ‘sold the family silver too cheap’.

It focused on Manchester Life, a joint venture between the city and Sheik Mansour, which kicked off in 2015 and ran throughout Burnham’s subsequent reign as mayor from 2017.

The project to convert run-down Victorian buildings in the Ancoats and New Islington areas into thousands of expensive flats ‘represents a transfer of public wealth to private hands that is difficult to justify as prudent,’ the report concluded.

Tens of millions in public assets were placed into offshore ownership, via holding companies registered to Jersey, leaving the Exchequer with almost no corporation tax.

The council’s share of profits, accrued from an empire that came to be valued at £350million in a few short years, amounted to a mere £3million.

Awkwardly, every single one of the £55million in taxpayer-funded loans to Man City’s owners, which were signed off on Burnham’s watch, went to development projects carried out under the Manchester Life umbrella.

All of which brings us back to Westminster.

In a bid to get ahead of what was starting to become a very whiffy scandal indeed, the Prime Minister announced on Monday that he intended to make full details of all his ‘dealings’ with the Emiratis public.

Specifically, Burnham told Parliament that ‘all my dealings will be published this afternoon in relation to any meetings with the owners of Manchester City’. A couple of hours later those ‘dealings’ were supposedly made public via a ‘statement’ uploaded to the GMCA’s website. But it ran to just 136 words and suggested that Burnham had only ever had one formal meeting with said owners. This was supposedly in 2021, when he’d met Al Mubarak at a government summit.

The GMCA disclosure did admit that Burnham had attended ‘a small number’ of other matches at the Etihad. But it made no mention of any further meetings with the boss, beyond one ‘informal’ encounter at a testimonial for Manchester City’s former captain Vincent Kompany.

The PM’s only other ‘dealings’ with the club had involved staff accompanying him on a couple of foreign jaunts ‘to China and Japan’ as part of ‘Mayoral International Visits’, the GMCA statement claimed.

There was but one problem with this claim: it was at best highly misleading, and at worst patently untrue.

The GMCA statement did not mention the two occasions when Burnham dined with Al Mubarak, in a box at the Etihad. Neither did it mention that he had chaired a meeting shortly afterwards at which the organisation he ran agreed to give the club’s owners some £55million in taxpayer loans.

‘If that meeting isn’t a dealing with Manchester City and their owners, I don’t know what is,’ said the Tory Shadow sports minister Louie French yesterday.

There was no disclosure of calls, conversations or discussions between Burnham and the Emiratis. No publication of minutes of any meetings, nor emails between the mayor’s office and the football club’s owners, and their related companies.

Neither did the GMCA statement contain details of two meetings between Burnham and senior Man City executives at the Co-op Live indoor arena, which Sheik Mansour partially owns.

Last night, The Times revealed that Burnham also met Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, and Roel de Vries, the former chief operating officer, there in 2023 and 2025 respectively.

As the Lib Dem sports spokesperson, Anna Sabine, told me yesterday: ‘In his statement to the Commons, he promised to make his dealings public.

We were promised full transparency, and what we have instead just isn’t.’

Adding to the sense of cover-up is the fact that the GMCA has, in recent weeks, decided to remove every single one of Andy Burnham’s declarations of interest, from his first term as mayor, from its website.

This not only means that the hospitality dinners he enjoyed with the Man City chairman effectively vanished from the public record but has also made it impossible to track other political donations he received during much of his nine-year reign.

It’s unclear why the authority deleted these records. It did not respond to requests for comment yesterday and wouldn’t discuss the various apparent discrepancies in its 136-word statement.

Yet spend a few days digging into Manchester’s political scene and you will soon come to realise that a dismissive attitude to the public’s right to know is par for the course in a city that has been run as a one-party Labour fiefdom for more than 50 years.

Such is the code of omerta surrounding the council’s affairs, and its property dealings, that I have this week been unable to find a single councillor, from any party, willing to discuss them on the record.

Those willing to talk anonymously point out that, while much of Burnham’s so-called ‘Manchesterism’ was financed with Emirati gold, other special deals were done with firms from repressive states such as China.

Criticism of Abu Dhabi’s was more or less banned from council events. A reference to the administration having ‘sold out’ on human rights by going into business with the Gulf state was even expunged from an event for local dignitaries marking the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre in 2019.

We only know about many of Manchester’s more dubious property deals because of Freedom of Information disclosures, often heavily redacted.

One particular humdinger, dating back to the early days of Burnham’s reign in 2017, revealed that the council had bought a former retail park in Ancoats for £35million, millions more than its estimated value. At the time, their chums from Abu Dhabi had refusal rights over the land in question.

In July, Burnham’s deputy Prime Minister, Lucy Powell, announced that she was ‘delighted, not least as it is near my office, that [the site] will be the home of No10 North!’

However, as controversy over Emirati gold has mounted, that plan appears to have been quietly scrapped.

For now, the PM’s office is in temporary accommodation opposite City Hall.

As to the Emirati scandal, where it will now end is anyone’s guess.

Having told Parliament on Monday that he would publish ‘all my dealings’ with the Emiratis, Burnham appeared to change that policy on the hoof at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, saying instead that he only intended to let the GMCA set out ‘my key dealings’ with City’s owners.

No10 were last night refusing to comment on this screeching U-turn, but cynics will conclude that the PM has something to hide, and Kemi Badenoch now scents blood, saying his ‘carefully-worded’ claims would ‘not suffice’. And so this messy controversy continues.