Andy Burnham had two hospitality dinners with Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak during his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, dining with him at matches in 2017 and 2018. The dinners were not set out in a statement issued on Monday by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority about the prime minister’s meetings with the club.
The GMCA statement, which covered Burnham’s dealings with Manchester City across almost a decade as the region’s mayor, said he had held a formal meeting with Al Mubarak in October 2021 at the UK Government’s Global Investment Summit, arranged by the Department for International Trade. It also said he met the club chairman informally in the stands at a 2019 testimonial match for former Manchester City player Vincent Kompany, and that in his capacity as mayor he had been a guest of the club at home matches on a small number of occasions. The statement did not specify that this referred to the two hospitality dinners with the chairman.
A previous GMCA register of declarations, seen by the BBC, recorded those dinners in more detail. One entry described a dinner with then-Manchester City Council leader Richard Leese and the chair of Manchester City at an Everton match at the Etihad Stadium in August 2017, valued at £300 for hospitality. Another recorded a dinner with the chairman at the Manchester City-Manchester United derby at the Etihad in April 2018, valued at approximately £699. Burnham had also declared a £150 pair of tickets to see Ed Sheeran perform at the stadium in May 2018. The register has since been deleted from the GMCA website, as first reported by The Sun, though the BBC understands it is the authority’s policy to publish only entries from the current mayoral term. BBC News has asked the GMCA for more detail on that policy, given its website carries entries dating back to 2022 even though the current mayoral term began in 2024.
Downing Street has defended the two dinners, saying they were hospitality received at home games and had been declared, rather than separate meetings with the club chairman. Political pressure on Burnham to be clearer about any former discussions with Manchester City is nonetheless continuing to build. The Conservative shadow sports minister, Louie French, said: “Andy Burnham promised the country and House of Commons full transparency on his dealings with Manchester City. This was essential after his inappropriate intervention into football.” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has demanded that No 10 release all details of meetings between the prime minister and senior figures at the club.
Burnham addressed the questions on the Rest Is Politics podcast last week, saying: “I’ve been asked by the leader of the opposition to publish details of my meetings, which I’m happy to do and I’m going to. I will quite clearly put out there everything that I have done working with them in my previous role as Mayor of Greater Manchester. None of it is recent, actually, in terms of the meetings I had. I only had one significant meeting, actually, and that was in 2021.” The list of meetings published by the GMCA on Monday did not include detail on what was discussed, and the BBC has asked the authority why the two dinners were not specifically mentioned.
Burnham, who was mayor until June, drew widespread controversy last month when he said he would be “really concerned” if the club’s owners now sold up — remarks that followed the growing pressure on him to clarify his past discussions with Manchester City. That pressure stems from September, when an independent commission found the club guilty of breaching Premier League financial regulations. The commission concluded that City had broken the rules over a nine-year period between 2009 and 2018 by creating “sham” contracts with commercial partners to secretly funnel more than £830m into their football operations. Sanctions have yet to be announced, and City, which denies any wrongdoing, has lodged an appeal against the verdict.
Separately, Sir Richard Leese — who headed Manchester City Council for 25 years until 2021 — defended earlier this month a decade-old deal between the council and Manchester City’s owners, Abu Dhabi United Group. Under the partnership between the authority and the company, which is linked to the United Arab Emirates royal family, land was leased to ADUG at “below comparable rates”, according to a University of Sheffield report.