Kogan made the comments on The Rest Is Football podcast, while stressing that no decision about Manchester City could be made before the club’s appeal against the commission’s findings has been resolved.
The independent commission found City had breached Premier League rules through commercial arrangements that inflated revenue or reduced costs by more than £900 million over nine seasons. City have appealed the verdict, and the findings are not the final word in the case.
Asked whether an owner could refuse to leave if the regulator judged their conduct unacceptable, Kogan replied: “No, we’ve got absolute power to do so.”
He explained that the IFR could assess owners against its own standards of fitness, fairness and propriety, rather than simply duplicating the Premier League’s disciplinary process. Its powers under the Football Governance Act include removing owners and suspending or revoking a club’s operating licence in sufficiently serious cases.
Kogan was careful not to suggest that Sheikh Mansour or City’s ownership had already been judged by the new regulator. The IFR has yet to decide whether it will open its own investigation, and Kogan said it first needed to understand the outcome of the appeal and the evidence behind the commission’s redacted findings.
“There are two further elements that might come up before the appeal that we don’t know,” he said, pointing to the outstanding question of sanctions and the fact that the published findings omit material. He added that the unredacted evidence could raise further issues.
“I am not going to get pushed into making any judgement on this until we’ve seen all of those questions being answered and then we will have to decide whether we’re going to mount our own investigation and come to a conclusion on that and what we’re going to do. And pre-empting that would be a colossal mistake.”
The possibility of further scrutiny has political implications because of City’s Abu Dhabi ownership and the wider relationship between the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. Kogan has previously said he would resign if political interference affected the regulator’s work, and has insisted no such pressure has been applied.
For now, the immediate process remains City’s appeal. Any separate IFR action would depend on what emerges once that process has concluded.