October 13 – Andy Burnham held a formal meeting with Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak at an investment summit, attended Vincent Kompany’s testimonial match, and was accompanied by club staff on official overseas trips.
Following pressure to release details over Burnham’s dealings as Mayor of Greater Manchester with the club, found guilty over breaching the Premier League’s financial rules, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) issued a statement that shed some light on the issue.
A GMCA spokesperson said: “In October 2021 Andy Burnham, in his role as Mayor of Greater Manchester, had a formal meeting with Khaldoon Al Mubarak at the UK Government’s Global Investment Summit arranged by the Department for International Trade.
“In his capacity as Mayor, he was a guest of Manchester City FC at home matches on a small number of occasions, including attending Vincent Kompany’s testimonial match in September 2019, where he met the Chairman informally in the stands. These have been declared in the usual way.
“Also during his time as Mayor, representatives of Greater Manchester sporting clubs would routinely join business delegations as part of Mayoral international visits. This included representatives from Manchester United travelling to Austin and Dublin, Lancashire Cricket Club joining a delegation to India, and Manchester City FC staff supporting visits to China and Japan.”
Last month, Burnham voiced his concerns that City’s Abu Dhabi owners might sell the club in the wake of the guilty verdict, but Number Ten later clarified his statement saying that where wrongdoing was established, those responsible should face the consequences.
The Shadow Sports Minister Louie French argued that the discloses was far from sufficient, arguing that it lacked “the full transparency that football fans deserve”.
French said: “Burnham cannot hide behind the GMCA – he must take responsibility for this himself. We have been given precious little information about these meetings, what was discussed and what may have been agreed.
“If Burnham has nothing to hide, why is he being so tight-lipped? His bizarre intervention in defence of Man City’s owners has raised serious concerns among fans. It’s time for the Prime Minister to come clean about his relationship with City Football Group so the public can make their own conclusions.”
On Sunday, City returned to action with a 3-0 away victory against Liverpool. Their fans carried inflatable bananas to the away end, a nod to the club’s time in the lower leagues. City have always maintained their innocence and have appealed the guilty verdict.
Contact the writer of this story, Samindra Kunti, at [email protected]
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
