Man City push the Pannick button after FA charges

Two top lawyers revealed this week as pivotal in the process of deciding the fate of Manchester City football club are both well known to Britain’s Jewish communities.

The north-west club, owned by the billionaire rulers of Abu Dhabi, has been charged with repeated breaches of the sport’s financial rules and may now be either docked points or even demoted from the top league.

Chairing the disciplinary panel will be Deputy High Court judge and Arsenal Football Club member Murray Rosen KC, an experienced sports arbitrator who has also ruled on one of the highest profile cases in the Jewish world of recent years, in 2018.

Leading the defence of Manchester City is barrister Lord David Pannick KC, who is perhaps best known for successfully challenging the Conservative government’s attempts to leave the European Union whilst bypassing Parliament, first in 2016 and then again in 2019.

A patron of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), Pannick represented JFS in 2009 over its admissions policy in a case at the Supreme Court. The school had refused to admit a 12-year-old boy after the Chief Rabbi ruled that his mother’s conversion to Judaism was invalid.

In 2018, Rosen was asked to withdraw comments that he had made about fraud in the Charedi community of Stamford Hill by the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregation, an umbrella group representing more than 100 strictly Orthodox synagogues.

Rosen had voiced concern at evidence given to him that an arrangement to fraudulently obtain housing benefit was common. The Union said it was “disappointed” with the comments, which it called “an offensive generalisation”.

Allegations of benefit fraud were made by Miriam Kliers, a former member of the Stamford Hill Charedi community, during a case brought against her ex-husband Shlomo Kliers and one of her brothers, Mordechai Schmerler, over their £1.4m former marital home.