Dear readers — ‘Conquering soccer and arming warlords’ ran a dramatic headline in the New York Times over the weekend, as an investigation by the paper revealed ties between Manchester City owner and New Islington mega-landlord Sheikh Mansour and a Sudanese paramilitary group. Until now, Mansour’s cultivated public image led many to believe he kept his distance from Emirati politics, but he now stands accused of setting up a hospital as “a cover for the secret Emirati effort to smuggle drones and other powerful weapons” to the Sudan paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces in a conflict that has killed 150,000 people. The reporting, described by Emirati officials as “reckless and harmful”, may also leave questions for Manchester City Council, who have been more than close friends of Mansour since he first arrived in the city in 2008. That’s the lead story of today’s Mill briefing.
Given how many compliments we've had about our new website, we thought our designer Jenny Miles deserved a proper shout out. Jenny is an award-winning graphic designer with over 20 years of international experience spanning creative brand strategy, graphic design, and visual storytelling across a wide range of platforms including branding, print, packaging, websites, social media and full 360 campaigns. She's worked for top clients like FIAT, Penguin Books, New York Magazine and us. You can find her here.
And a correction: In our weekend read “A murder of crows: how a blog post deepened the conflict inside Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust” we stated that GMMH covers the whole of Greater Manchester. In fact, it covers Manchester, Trafford, Salford, Bolton and Wigan, and the rest of Greater Manchester is covered by Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust. We apologise for the error.
Local festival returns with hometown headliners
From today’s sponsor: Newton Music Festival returned last year after a 15-year hiatus, with home town headliners The K’s ensuring it was a massive hit. The festival is back in the beautiful Mesnes park, just a 20 minute train from Piccadilly, from Friday 1 to Sunday 3 August. Across the three days you can expect a range of acts and atmospheres, from an upbeat Friday night to fun tributes on the Sunday. The lineup includes The K’s, The Nextmen and longtime Miller Dave Haslam. Day tickets start at £15 and Mill readers can get an exclusive 10% discount using the code ‘1qjpad’ – click here to book.
We’ve just hired a new member of staff, Grace Moriarty, to oversee our sponsorships! If you’d like to sponsor some editions of The Mill and reach over 58,000 Millers, you can get in touch at grace@millmediaco.uk.
⛅️ This week’s weather
Tuesday 🌦️ Warm and largely cloudy with a few showers during the afternoon. 22°C.
Wednesday 🌦️ Breezy and cooler with occasional showers. 19°C.
Thursday 🌤️ Warm and dry with sunny spells. Breezy. 22°C.
Friday 🌦️ Sunny spells during the morning, but cloudier during the afternoon with a few showers later.
Weekend 🌦️ Cool and breezy with changeable weather conditions.
We get our weekly forecast from Manchester Weather.
Your briefing
📰 The New York Times has surfaced serious allegations about Sheikh Mansour, the Emirati Royal who owns Manchester City FC as well as roughly 1,500 homes in New Islington (homes that were bought at a fraction of their value via his company, Manchester Life). Mansour, who is generally perceived to keep a distance from politics, is now accused of setting up a hospital for injured civilians in Sudan as “a cover for the secret Emirati effort to smuggle drones and other powerful weapons” to Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group in Sudan, according to intelligence from US and UN officials. Those officials believe Mansour has actually played a central role in the effort to arm Rapid Support Forces in a civil war that has led to widespread famine, caused 150,000 deaths and displaced over 12 million people. In response, Emirati officials accused the New York Times of making “reckless and harmful” statements by suggesting the hospital was doing anything other than humanitarian work, but did not respond to detailed questions about Mansour’s ties to the paramilitary group and his role in the war. The in-depth investigation reveals that Manchester City has also “served political purposes” for Mansour. According to a briefing dossier seen by The New York Times, journalists who attended briefings in 2014 received briefing documents that “sought to link Qatar, a rival of the Emirates, to international terrorism”. Manchester City, which has become one of the most lucrative football clubs in the world under Mansour’s ownership (“Sheikh Mansour, Manchester Thanks You,” reads a banner that hangs permanently at the Etihad), also did not respond to requests for comment, and did not to deny that journalists were briefed on these topics. It is not yet known whether the revelations in this investigation will cause embarrassment for Manchester City Council, whose close ties to Mansour and his developments in New Islington have led to accusations of special treatment in the past. Former council leader Richard Leese once praised Manchester Life for delivering “a significant positive impact on Ancoats and New Islington” and for having “rebuilt confidence in the area”, though that’s probably unlikely to cheer up the millions of displaced people of Sudan.
🏚️ Half of rented homes in Greater Manchester are now regulated by the Good Landlord Charter, which allows the combined authority to issue civil penalties against negligent and rogue social and private landlords. 108 landlords have signed up to the charter since applications opened in April, which requires participants to meet seven “good renting” characteristics, including allowing tenants to feel free to enjoy their home and make it their own and responding quickly to maintenance issues. “Fundamentally, we need to shift both the incentives for landlords to act positively and the disincentives for those who act harmfully,” said the combined authority’s housing lead Paul Dennett.
📊 YouGov's MRP poll thinks that based on public sentiment at this point, 13 constituencies in Greater Manchester would vote Reform in an imminent general election. The constituencies where Reform is predicted to take seats from Labour include Oldham East and Saddleworth, where Labour has held control for three decades, Ashton under Lyne, which would unseat deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, and Stalybridge and Hyde, a constituency that includes Longdendale ward in its boundaries, where Reform councillor Allan Hopwood (read our recent profile if you want to find out about Hopwood’s views, or his proficiency on a dirt bike) recently scooped a win by a 422 vote margin. The poll predicts that Labour would hold on to 12 seats, and the Lib Dems would hold on to two.
🎨 “Should we continue to display the body of Asru?” asks a new plaque at Manchester Museum, which has opened a public consultation on whether it should continue to display the body of an ancient Egyptian woman, who was acquired by two cotton merchants in the nineteenth century and donated to the Manchester Natural History Society, which later became Manchester Museum. Chris Osuh, the Guardian's community affairs correspondent, says the consultation comes as part of the museum’s efforts to expose how the museum sector "has benefitted from colonialism and transatlantic slavery".
📷 Andrew Gwynne, MP for Gorton and Denton, has apologised for editing a photo to make it look like he was attending Armed Forces Day in Denton. Gwynne removed the photo after social media users noticed his pose and attire were the exact same as in a photo of him in Levenshulme the day before, and told The Mail: “It was just a simple mistake”. Gwynne is on an awful run of luck at the moment, having made another unfortunate slip up in February: wishing death upon a pensioner in a leaked WhatsApp chat.
💰 Manchester City Council has become the first local authority to scrap council tax payments for those living with terminal illness. It comes after a long campaign by the hospice care charity Marie Curie. Campaigns manager Sarah Middlemiss says the work now begins to bring other councils on board. Council leader Bev Craig said the council wanted to do “all we can to ease the burden at the end of someone's life”.
🏫It’s boomtime in Urmston, where four properties have recently sold for an average price of £738,737, with one recently fetching £2m, reports the MEN. Lynsey Evans, 45, says she believes the borough’s illustrious grammar schools are pushing up prices. “We probably have the best primary schools in Greater Manchester, and people are moving here from places like Chorlton and Didsbury, which traditionally are perceived to be a lot more upmarket than here.”
Quick hits
🎨 Manchester Art Gallery has added the works of artists Jack Brown and David Penny to its permanent collection, an acquisition made possible by the Manchester Contemporary Art Fund. Brown’s selected series, The grease marks left by a passenger's hair on the bus, is inspired by bus journeys he took through Stockport, and Penny’s series of abstract prints, Untitled, Laser No 7, were created in partnership with nanomaterial physicists at Kings College.
🔮 Mike Ingall, the Spinningfields property developer who successfully predicted Manchester city centre’s population would reach 100,000 by 2025, has been looking into his crystal ball again. Now, he predicts the city centre population will grow to 250,000 by 2030, a rise of 150,000 in just five years.
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🍝 Kala, the French bistro tucked away on King Street, has closed. Head chef Gary Usher wrote in a statement that “I’m not really sure how to explain why we’ve closed other than we weren’t busy enough to cover our costs” and promised all the Kala team would be paid for their final month of work.
🎧 Chorlton has a new live music venue. KAMERA, nestled in the room above Lloyd’s pub on Wilbraham Road, launched last Friday with a gig curated by DIY collective Alphaville. More here.
Home of the week
Got £575,000 going spare? This three-bed house in Worsley is apparently on one of the town’s “most prestigious roads”.
Our favourite reads
Manchester, the city that sold out to Abu Dhabi — The Times
If you want to get a better sense of Manchester’s ties to Sheikh Mansour, read this 2019 piece in the Times. In 2014 Mansour’s development group entered an agreement with Manchester City Council in 2014 called Manchester Life, where the council supplied land for development, with Mansour’s group fronting the cash. The Times revealed that the council got none of the rental income from the new flats. It raised questions about special treatment and sweetheart deals between the city council and a man who, as the New York Times has now revealed, bankrolls warlords.
How do 11 people go to jail for one murder? — The Guardian
Are joint enterprise laws — legal doctrine allowing multiple people to be charged with one crime — being used inappropriately? The Guardian explores the use of the laws to secure blanket convictions for young black men accused of being “gang” members, and explores the case of Abdul Hafidah, who was killed in Moss Side in 2016. 11 young men went to prison for the murder, even though only one delivered the fatal blow. Some weren’t even close to Hafidah when he died.
We loved this story by our sister paper in Liverpool, The Post, about the latest exploits of one of the north west’s most notorious property developers: Peter McInnes. In his old life, McInnes was linked to high-profile collapsed property schemes in Liverpool and accused in court of money laundering on behalf of drug dealers (something he denies) but these days he has a new profession: crypto kingpin. He’s also got a new name, Paddy McInnes, but things have recently taken an unfortunate turn for Paddy… he’s been named as one of seven defendants suspected of engineering a $400 million international fraud.
Our to do list
Tuesday
📮 Jo Hamilton – victim of the infamous Post Office Scandal – will be at Central Library sharing her experience and promoting her new book. This event is pay what you can.
🔔 And the award-winning piece of dance theatre The Midnight Bell is coming to the Lowry — you can get tickets here.
Wednesday
🩰 There’s a lot of dancing going on this week, including a contemporary ballet performance of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man performed at Aviva Studios.
📷 And if we’ve got any Oasis fans among our readership, Kimpton Clocktower Hotel are putting on a free exhibition of never-before-seen photos of the band, taken by NME photographer John Shard. The first 50 guests get a free zine too.
Thursday
🍺 Thursday marks the start of Manchester Live Hub: a hang out spot in Piccadilly Gardens set to stay for the rest of the summer, with food stalls and a bar. Will Piccadilly Gardens finally become a place people want to spend time in?
🐘 And they’re finally arriving — 70 life-sized animal puppets will be marching through Market Street as The Herds arrive in Manchester, as part of MIF.
Got a To-Do that you’d like us to list? Tell us about it here.
Thanks again to Newton Music Festival for sponsoring this edition. Click here for tickets.
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