By Prime Minister Andy Burnham had two hospitality dinners with Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak while serving as mayor of Greater Manchester, newly surfaced records show. The dinners, in 2017 and 2018, were not specifically detailed in the statement his office released on Monday about his dealings with the club.
The revelation piles fresh pressure on Burnham to be fully transparent about his past relationship with City, just weeks after the club was found guilty of systematically breaking Premier League rules.
Andy Burnham with Khaldoon Al Mubarak (Credits: BBC)
The Dinners the Statement Left Out
On Monday, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) published a summary of Burnham’s meetings with Manchester City during his near-decade as mayor. It listed a formal meeting with Al Mubarak at the UK Government’s Global Investment Summit in October 2021, an informal chat in the stands at Vincent Kompany’s 2019 testimonial, and noted he had been the club’s guest at home matches on a small number of occasions.
What it did not spell out was that those home-match visits included two hospitality dinners with the chairman himself. A previous GMCA register of declarations, seen by the BBC, recorded a “dinner with then-Manchester City Council leader Richard Leese and Chair of Man City” at an Everton match in August 2017, valued at 300 pounds for hospitality. A second entry logged a “dinner with the Chairman at the Man City/Man Utd derby” in April 2018, valued at around 699 pounds.
Burnham had declared both dinners at the time, alongside a 150-pound pair of tickets to see Ed Sheeran perform at the Etihad in May 2018. The problem is that the register has since been deleted from the GMCA website. The authority says its policy is to publish declarations only from the current mayoral term, but its site still carries entries dating back to 2022 even though the current term began in 2024.
Mounting Political Pressure
Downing Street has defended the dinners, insisting they were declared hospitality received at home games rather than separate meetings with the chairman. But the political heat is rising. Burnham has been under scrutiny since City were found guilty by an independent commission of breaching financial regulations, a verdict the club will appeal, and since he said last month he would be “really concerned” if the club’s owners sold up.
Conservative shadow sports minister Louie French accused Burnham of breaking a promise of full transparency after what he called an inappropriate intervention into football. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has demanded No 10 release every detail of meetings between the prime minister and senior figures at the club.
Burnham told the Rest Is Politics podcast last week that he is happy to publish everything, insisting none of the meetings were recent and that he had only one significant meeting, in 2021. The GMCA list, however, gave no detail on what was discussed at any of the encounters, and the BBC has asked why the two dinners were not specifically mentioned.
With the opposition demanding full disclosure and the deleted register raising eyebrows, this story is unlikely to fade quietly.
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Source: BBC — read the full story there.
