Man City's 115-charge verdict lands as football's biggest financial scandal

The Premier League confirmed the verdict on 29 September, according to SportsPro. An independent commission found City guilty on 114 of the 115 charges levelled against the club in 2023 for breaches of cost-control rules. The scale of the deception was put at more than UK£900 million across nine seasons.

The investigation determined City "artificially inflate[d] the club's revenues, and reduce[d] its costs" over a period in which they won three of their eight Premier League titles. The club's leadership was found to have generated "sham" contracts to disguise direct investment from owner Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), the vehicle created by Sheikh Mansour to buy the club in 2008, as sponsorship income. City were also convicted on every charge of financial misconduct, including filing misstated accounts to soccer authorities, and on all but one count of failure to cooperate with the investigation. Premier League chief executive Richard Masters described the disciplinary case as "the most significant" in its history, SportsPro reported.

Appeal, civil action and Etihad

The club said it will pursue an appeal "on the basis that the opinion contains clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe".

Chief executive Ferran Soriano, who did not comment when approached by Sky News at a European Football Clubs meeting in Copenhagen, sent a three-minute video to City staff dismissing the findings as a conspiracy theory, according to SportsPro. Possible repercussions are already multiplying. Other clubs are exploring civil action, City's owners are doubling down on their innocence, and lead partner Etihad is threatening legal action against the Premier League, SportsPro reported. The process that began with a four-week hearing last year yielded 7,000 pages of transcripts and 750 pages of supporting documents.

"The current state is relatively bleak," Tim Pawlenty said of solar's political clout in Washington. "But nothing stays the same in politics, and there's hope in what's to come in the future."

That quote comes from a different business story this week. Pawlenty, the former two-term Republican governor of Minnesota, took over as president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association in June, Canary Media reported on 24 September. He was speaking onstage at Canary Media's Climate Week NYC summit.

Pawlenty claimed the business fundamentals for solar and storage have never looked stronger. "Solar and storage is the most cost-effective form of energy in the country, without question," he said. He also argued the U.S. has nearly eliminated Chinese panels through trade policy and domestic manufacturing growth, and said the industry should push to "turbocharge" domestic manufacturing.

Robot funding and EV values

On the industrial robotics side, Paris-based Inbolt raised 11 million euros in a round led by Shift4Good, with Bridges Climate Transition Partners and existing investors BNP Paribas Développement and Ora Global participating, Tech.eu reported on 30 September. The investment brings Inbolt's total funding to 30 million euros. The company says its 3D vision and hardware-agnostic AI software is deployed on more than 200 robots in over 100 factories across three continents, with customers including Bosch, Beko, Flex, Ford, Stellantis and Toyota.

Maven Robotics, founded in 2024, has raised $100 million and moved from early pilots to a production contract with its first customer, The Robot Report reported on 1 October. CEO Hamza Derbas said its robots run 16 hours a day, five days a week, with up to 99% uptime. The company raised its Series A last month.

In transport, a Transport & Environment analysis published on 29 September argued electric cars retain their value better than the leasing industry claims. In Germany, France, Italy and Spain, 2025 used-car transaction data shows a 12.9 percentage point depreciation gap between combustion and electric cars, CleanTechnica reported. Adjusting for five variables that T&E says are omitted reduces that gap by 80% to 2.6 percentage points.

In Ireland, the first solar farm under the government's Small-Scale Renewable Energy Support Scheme has been energised in County Cork. The 650 kW Meadhill Solar farm, developed by farmer Sean Keating, can power around 150 homes and has a 15-year power purchase agreement with Flogas, pv magazine reported on 1 October. Flogas managing director Ken O'Byrne said there is "a lot of capacity yet to be allocated" under the scheme.