GENEVA (AP) — Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of the scandal-plagued Manchester City soccer club, sat with Donald Trump in Davos this year, signing on to the U.S. president’s Board of Peace on behalf of the United Arab Emirates government.
He was with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles in June at a signing ceremony for a business summit.
Al Mubarak, 50, also is a UAE special envoy to China, and welcomed Xi Jinping to the club
when the Chinese leader visited England in 2015.
Why the head of an English soccer club — albeit one of the wealthiest, most successful and now highly controversial — should be a key player at such political events is easily explained.
Al Mubarak, the public face of the 2023 Champions League winner now embroiled in one of soccer's biggest scandals, is a member of the ruling elite in Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — and the head of a $385 billion sovereign wealth fund.
His family has a long tradition of public service that he has continued with a long list of roles serving his nation's interests, including as a strategy advisor to its president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known as MBZ, and a board member of both Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Before entering European soccer, Al Mubarak was a key liaison with F1 when the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix joined the circuit.
When Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, now a deputy prime minister of the UAE, bought the long-time underachieving soccer club in 2008, Al Mubarak was installed as chairman to oversee what became a turnaround that was barely believable to an older generation of fans.
The story of sporting and financial success was, according to the verdict by an investigatory panel, too good to be true.
The Premier League announced Tuesday that its most successful club over the past 15 seasons, and current standings leader, systematically broke financial monitoring rules for years.
An independent panel of judges appointed by the league said City orchestrated “sham” contracts with commercial partners to disguise secret funding of more than 830 million pounds ($1.1 billion) by the Abu Dhabi ownership between 2009-18. Club witnesses also gave evidence “they knew to be untrue."
That money helped pay high-value transfer fees and wages for players, some signed from City’s biggest rivals, that fueled the club’s trophy-laden rise to become a European power.
For City it was a virtuous circle: winning titles led to earning more prize money and building a global brand that led to attracting more of the world’s best players, like today’s superstar goal scorer Erling Haaland.
The devastating judgment, which City can appeal, said the club broke Premier League rules designed to keep clubs financially stable and secure, and which rivals like Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United complied with.
Reports of the pending verdict leaked Friday to The Athletic, and the club responded a day later with a statement from Al Mubarak.
“Here’s what I said to my family,” he said. “The Premier League process still has a long way to run, and our confidence and intent in proving the Club’s innocence is just as strong as when this began.”
In a rare interview in 2009, with British daily The Guardian, he spoke of City as representing Abu Dhabi's values. "These are loyalty, commitment, discipline, long-term thinking, respect, appreciation of history.”
“This is showing the world the true essence of who Abu Dhabi is and what Abu Dhabi is about,” he said.
Al Mubarak was an elegant, articulate embodiment of a project many saw as an extension of Abu Dhabi soft power as much as a sheikh’s personal investment. He also is chairman of City Football Group, the global network of 12 clubs anchored by Man City that includes New York City FC.
A graduate in economics from Tufts University near Boston, he oversees the Mubadala wealth fund among a slew of key government positions.
Al Mubarak's father, Khalifa Al Mubarak, was a diplomat who served as the UAE’s ambassador to France.
He was assassinated in Paris in February 1984, shot on a street outside his residence close to the Eiffel Tower. Khaldoon Al Mubarak was 8. The killing was linked to the Abu Nidal Organization, a violent group calling for Israel's destruction.
Gulf media has reported that the young Khaldoon was mentored by the royal family in the wake of his father's death. In 2018 a street in Abu Dhabi was renamed for the slain diplomat.
As Man City's finances and compliance with soccer's rules came under more scrutiny, including by UEFA investigations judged in 2014 and 2020, Al Mubarak's public comments were limited to end-of-season interviews filmed and conducted by the club's own staff.
A landmark UEFA case in 2020 — won by City on an appeal that overturned a two-year ban from the Champions League — and the Premier League case were sparked by internal club emails and documents obtained by a hacker-whistleblower.
They were published in a series of articles by German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, that gave insight into the City chairman's resolve for a legal battle.
In 2014, when UEFA's then-general secretary, now FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, was in talks with Man City about settling a rules breach with a fine, the club's lawyer Simon Cliff sent an email with a line yet to be forgotten.
“Khaldoon said," Cliff wrote, "he would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years.”
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