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It was confirmed on Tuesday that an independent commission found City guilty of all charges relating to breaches of the Premier League's financial regulations between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons.

City have repeatedly denied guilt, and have signalled an intent to lodge an appeal by Friday.

The club were found to have artificially inflated revenue through "sham" sponsorship agreements with the help of their owners.

The independent commission which studied the case found City "utilised devices" to "disguise the true extent of certain club liabilities".

The Treasury Committee, which is responsible for overseeing policies and administration of HMRC, has therefore asked whether the government department has requested the redacted documents contained within the commission's report.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Committee, said she would "welcome reassurance from HMRC that you are seized of the importance of these issues and the public interest in this case".

The letter follows a report from the Tax Policy Associates, external which claims City failed to pay as much as £12m in unpaid tax because of a "sham" contract with former manager Roberto Mancini.

In addition to unpaid income tax and National Insurance, the report claims City could face a penalty charge that would take their liabilities to £24m.

Manchester City will claim as part of their appeal that key sponsorship deals were funded by the Abu Dhabi government, rather than the club's owners.

Owners Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) - a private investment company belonging to United Arab Emirates vice-president and deputy prime minister Sheikh Mansour - are said to have topped up the value of commercial deals as part of a "disguised funding scheme" to the scale of £830.69m.

This, it was argued, enabled the club to appear to comply with Premier League and Uefa financial rules.

However, as first reported by the Daily Mail and Times, sources have told BBC Sport that City are expected to tell an appeal board that they have evidence showing the money directed to sponsors came from the Abu Dhabi government, rather than from ADUG.

Premier League rules allow state-owned bodies to sponsor clubs.

The independent commission detailed how City had "denied there had ever been any disguised funding scheme of the type alleged by the Premier League. Its case was that [it] had misunderstood how Abu Dhabi sponsorship agreements had been funded... The reality was [the club contested] that Abu Dhabi sponsors had always been liable for all recorded sponsorship fees and all had in fact been paid to the club by Abu Dhabi sponsors from their own funds/resources.

"No part of any recorded sponsorship fee had been paid by ADUG or from using ADUG funds. Abu Dhabi sponsors had from time to time applied for financial assistance from the Abu Dhabi government toward their liability to pay the recorded sponsorship fees - such applications had been granted…"

The independent commission rejected this submission as "untrue", saying: "We concluded that it was an 'explanation' that the club had concocted well after the event in an attempt to obscure and conceal the realities of the disguised funding scheme."

City's argument is likely to lead to renewed debate over the extent to which City's ownership is separate from the Abu Dhabi state, and over the ramifications of club ownership with state connections.

Mansour is a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, and the brother of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Since the takeover in 2008, City have insisted the club is a completely private enterprise, and not state-owned. However, some critics have questioned the distinction, with human rights campaigners claiming the ownership of City has been used to "sportswash" the UAE.

On Saturday, City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak referred to "irrefutable evidence" that he claimed supports the club's claims of innocence. City have claimed the commission's decision contained "clear material errors, of law, principle and fact, and is unsafe".

It has emerged that Al Mubarak, who was appointed chairman of City following the takeover in 2008, is named as an Emirati diplomat on the UK government's current directory of all foreign representatives.

Representatives of foreign states and their diplomatic staff "enjoy privileges and immunities under the Diplomatic Privileges Act (1964)", giving diplomats immunity from prosecution under criminal, civil and administrative laws.

City's principal sponsor Etihad Airways has said it is considering legal action against the Premier League, claiming the release of the commission findings had "damaging implications… despite the airline not being named in the redacted published findings".

The UAE's state-owned national airline said it "categorically rejects any finding, conclusion or implication that suggests the airline has ever been involved in improper commercial arrangements".

Etihad is owned by sovereign wealth fund L'Imad which is chaired by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, the son of the UAE president.

The Premier League declined to comment when contacted by BBC Sport.

Additional reporting from James Landale, diplomatic correspondent for BBC News. %!s()

Throughout this week, Russia has accused Nato of preparing to blockade its territory, which borders Lithuania and Poland, warning that it would even be prepared to use nuclear weapons if the West tried to cut off Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.

Nato has sought to calm the situation, stressing it is a defensive alliance and urging Moscow to stop its "nuclear threats".

Western allies have faced a surge in so-called hybrid warfare incidents blamed on Russia, particularly in Poland and the Baltics in recent months.

Last week alone Poland said a Russian helicopter had strayed into its territory adjacent to Kaliningrad and Lithuania said its population felt "constantly threatened" by Russia, in part because of drones entering the nation's airspace.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that his country was preparing for further hybrid attacks, "including serious ones", after a drone armed with explosives was found in August on the tarmac at Leipzig airport close to Ukrainian cargo planes.

In a wide-ranging speech, the Russian leader told his audience he believed that international conflicts were highly likely to continue, but would get better as "Western hegemony" weakened.

Although Putin himself began the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, he again blamed the West for provoking the invasion, arguing that it had simply been forced to defend itself and take up arms.

He also insisted that Russia's attacks on Ukrainian economic targets were a direct response to Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil refineries, and on its ships in the Black Sea.

"Now from every direction we're receiving calls 'let's stop'. But they started it," he said.

Putin admitted Kyiv had "got some results" from its refinery attacks and Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP. Ukraine maintains it began attacking Russian oil infrastructure because it helped the Kremlin finance the war.

Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, ramping up attacks every winter since the war on Ukraine started in 2022. Other civilian infrastructure is also regularly hit, and a key bridge in Kyiv was attacked by drones on Thursday.

Putin also accused the West of instigating other conflicts.

"If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad but possibly some other territories, of course the issue of use by the Russian Federation of all arms at the disposal of our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda," he said.

He accused Nato of holding naval manoeuvres in the Baltic Sea which he argued represented serious threats to Kaliningrad. If the territory came under Western blockade, he said Russia would be prepared to use all means and forces, including nuclear.

"We are not threatening anyone. We do not intend to attack anyone in 2029, in 2030, in 2050. But if we come across an aggression we will have to respond. Citizens of European countries should be fully aware of that."

He added that while he was aware of the nuclear capabilities of countries such as the UK and France, the weapons at its disposal were unparalleled.

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte made clear on Wednesday that none of the alliance's "exercises or activities" posed any threat to Moscow and the Kremlin's messaging was "absolutely not called for and not helpful".

Putin spent some time talking about leading countries in the world having armaments at their disposal that could "swipe away all life or at least push the Earth to catastrophic consequences", and said unfortunately no-one could be sure they would never be used.

He drew the analogy of a gun sitting on a theatre stage - if it was hanging there at the start of the show, it would certainly fire at the end.

He appeared to call for the rules of warfare to be rewritten, and warned of the increasing risk of artificial intelligence.

"The automation and digitalisation of warfare leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and sliding back of humanity to barbarity," he said. %!s()

The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, called a crisis cabinet meeting on Thursday and told ministers to cancel travel plans to deal with the demonstrations, which erupted in the Paris region last week but have snowballed across the country.

Lecornu’s office said: “This upsurge in violence makes it virtually impossible to maintain the continuity of public education and is exposing staff and students to danger.” The education minister, Édouard Geffray, is to meet pupil representatives on Friday.

About 900 demonstrations, blockades and related incidents were under way outside high schools around the country, police said, with more than 160 shut down as a result. Access was also blocked to about 30 university campuses on Thursday, including in Paris and Marseille.

Nearly 3,000 lycée students – aged between 15 and 18 – have been detained since the start of the protests, including 1,949 on Thursday alone, the interior ministry said. More than 300 police and dozens of firefighters, teachers and pupils have been injured.

The pupils’ grievances range from overloaded timetables and overcrowded classes to insufficient teachers and unbearable temperatures during heatwaves earlier this year. Riot police have been deployed to confront the increasingly violent protests.

Injuries have mainly been from hurled objects but also from police-fired riot-control projectiles, with the interior ministry announcing an internal police investigation after accusations of excessive force and brutality by officers against three pupils.

Rubbish bins have been set on fire outside many schools and more serious arson attempts have been reported inside some buildings. Fire damage in one school in Nantes in the north-west was so extensive that it will stay closed for a month, authorities said.

In the northern city of Caen, 16-year-old Maelle said she wished those setting bins on fire would protest “with words”. Students were protesting “against this government that doesn’t invest in heating, air conditioning, or teachers’ salaries”, she told AFP.

In Strasbourg in the north-east, tram services were temporarily suspended to “restrict the movements of rioters and demonstrators”, the regional prefect said, after protesting students obstructed the tracks with crowd control barriers.

“There are 35 of us per classroom,” one 17-year-old Strasbourg student said. “There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms. The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources.”

Several bin fires were also reported in the southern city of Toulouse; while in Lille, young people wearing black hoodies destroyed a bus stop. In Marseille, there were attempts to light fires inside two schools. In one, a teacher was splashed with petrol.

While many teachers and several headteachers have reported being physically threatened and sometimes attacked, some support their pupils. Juliette Estiville, a high-school Spanish teacher in Paris, said that the police response had disgusted her.

“I’m actually here just to provide protection, to form a barrier between the police and the students,” she said. “Today went well, it’s going well, but I think that the teachers who come to the blockades are really there to protect our young people.”

The government has accused the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party of encouraging the protests, with several LFI MPs and mayors, including Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, cheered at demonstrations.

The party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, insisted on Thursday that LFI backed “non-violent methods of struggle” and added that his “greatest worry is an unbearable level of police violence against these young people”. %!s()

Using the stage name Cronos, with an eerie pallor and dressed in showboating leather ensembles as he made theatrical declarations about witches, Satan and the underworld, Lant brought great showmanship to the group, for whom he also played bass.

While they never reached the commercial heights of forebears such as Black Sabbath or the thrash bands that followed – they reached the UK Top 75 only once – Venom had a big impact, and their album Black Metal ended up giving a name to one of metal’s most important subgenres.

Lant was born in Chelsea, London but moved with his family to Newcastle aged seven. His brothers were also musicians, one a drummer who joined Prefab Sprout (“they were shite,” Lant would later opine), and another who drummed for Venom in the band’s 21st-century period.

Venom began as Guillotine, which Lant joined aged 16, initially on guitar, then bass and graduating to vocalist after a previous frontman left. Renamed Venom, the lineup solidified around Lant, guitarist Jeff Dunn (AKA Mantas) and drummer Tony Bray (AKA Abaddon), and they released their debut album Welcome to Hell in 1981. It featured the controversy-baiting single In League with Satan, which featured reversed speech about the devil and helped bring satanic imagery into metal.

Inspired by punk, Venom intensified the heaviness of early British heavy metal bands by playing at a furious pace. The Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne “was singing about the devil”, Lant said. “I wanted to be the devil.”

He told the Guardian in 2019: “I had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth. Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.”

That impulse came to bear on five more albums during the 1980s, including Black Metal, whose demonic cover art and raw, hellish sound “carved in stone some of the essential features” of the black metal genre, according to scene historians Michael J Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind in their book Lords of Chaos. Lant, who co-produced the album, said the making of it was “pure mayhem from start to finish”, with instrumentation including steel plates being cut into with a chainsaw, and a makeshift coffin having earth dumped on to it.

Venom went on hiatus in 1988 and Lant – after pondering a career change in forestry – went solo as Cronos, putting out two early 1990s albums. Venom then reformed for another seven LPs, the most recent being 2018’s Storm the Gates. There was another, shorter hiatus in the early 2000s while Lant recovered from a climbing injury.

He trained as a fitness instructor in the 1990s (“I did loads of classes, I played rave,” he later said) and also began parallel careers in computer engineering and graphic design, though Venom continued to tour, including at festivals in summer 2026.

Venom’s pace, ferocity and darkness all proved seductive to a new generation of metalheads in the 1980s, particularly thrash bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. “It was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity,” Scott Ian of Anthrax said admiringly of Welcome to Hell.

Lant collaborated with another admirer, Dave Grohl, for Grohl’s metal supergroup Probot in 2004.

Lant’s son Nathan thanked Venom’s fans after his father’s death. “I know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.” %!s()

The disclosure came in response to an Israel Defense Forces statement seeking to discredit the documentary.

In its response, which the IDF said was based on statements made by the film-makers and a review made by a representative who had attended a viewing, the Israeli military claimed there were “substantial errors” in the film and that it had relied on interviews with two dozen intelligence and other troops who had only a partial picture of the target approval process.

At the centre of the IDF’s rebuttal was its often repeated claim that its rules of engagement explicitly distinguish between militants and civilians and prohibit deliberately targeting civilians, while requiring commanders to take steps to minimise civilian harm, claims that have long been challenged over the years by critics.

While acknowledging that it used AI to help recommend potential targets in Gaza, the IDF also said final decisions made on strikes, and the risk of civilian casualties, were signed off by officers.

The IDF also denied that it had approved, planned or carried out an attack anticipating 500 civilian casualties in pursuit of a single Hamas target.

The IDF statement follows previous efforts by Israeli politicians to dismiss NAZA – a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike – which have accompanied death threats against the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and calls by the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for them to be stripped of their Israeli citizenship.

It also echoed previous complaints by some Israeli critics – including journalists – that the film’s military sources were anonymised, despite the fact that source protection in media investigations is commonplace and regarded by much of the media as an ethical requirement.

“The film NAZA presents a distorted, misleading, and unrealistic picture of the IDF’s target planning and strike processes. The film’s narrative is based on fundamental factual errors stemming from a skewed and manipulative portrayal,” the statement added.

Responding to the IDF statement, the Guardian, which produced the film, disclosed further details of how the team had verified the allegations which involved scores of interviews with those with knowledge of IDF targeting and authorisation processes.

A spokesperson said: “The IDF’s attempt to portray the 24 participants in NAZA as junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process is false.

“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorisation process.

“The process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous. It included leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.

“Over the past three years we have together interviewed more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in the war in Gaza, including senior-ranking commanders directly involved in the authorisation of strikes.

“The Guardian stands fully behind the film, which builds on three years of detailed reporting by the Guardian and our partners. Several highly respected news organisations have subsequently confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press.”

While Netanyahu has claimed that Israeli military safeguards have led to one of the lowest civilian-combatant ratios in modern warfare, that has been challenged by the IDF’s own leaked casualty assessments, by the UN’s commission of inquiry in 2024 and research by NGOs including Action on Armed Violence.

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