AND THERE'S MORE

From the Telegraph:

Manchester United will question up to 20 agents, including Sir Alex Ferguson's son Jason, during the internal inquiry into their transfer policy, it emerged last night.

Earlier, United delivered their first formal reply to the 99 questions posed by their major shareholder, John Magnier. Lawyers for the Irish multi-millionaire's investment company, Cubic Expression, received a document outlining the committees responsible for different areas of the plc and their role in the running of the club.

But it will be the more detailed investigation that has been launched by the United finance director, Nick Humby, which will have to convince Magnier and his business partner, J P McManus, that the club have been run according to corporate governance guidelines.

No details about individual agents were understood to have been included in yesterday's letter from the board to Magnier, but Humby has begun contacting football agents to investigate recent transfers, including the 15 highlighted by the club's major shareholder.

The 15 transfers cited by Cubic Expression, among the 99 questions in a letter to the United board leaked last week, cited deals as far back as July 1998, when Jaap Stam signed from PSV Eindhoven.

The investigation results will be presented to shareholders, but United will hope that the 13-page document sent to Magnier yesterday, which is being considered by his lawyers, will grant Humby the time to check their transfer history.

From the Guardian:

Alex Millar, who worked on Michael Crick's biography of Sir Alex Ferguson, explains how late last summer he was suddenly asked some very detailed questions about the Manchester United manager:

Late last August, in the middle of an endless sweltering summer, I was working for the BBC, developing storylines for a topical news programme, when a friend at work said he knew some people who wanted to talk to me. He was vague about what they were actually doing but said that they were interested in Sir Alex Ferguson but they weren't working on a TV project.

Curiosity got the better of me. I could not work out why they were interested. Everything seemed quiet at Manchester United. Sure, they had failed to bag Ronaldinho in the summer and had lost David Beckham. But they had partly made up for it with the capture of the prodigiously talented Cristiano Ronaldo.

The manager was signed up for the near future and the club were going into the new season as champions yet again. The only tiny cloud was some row Ferguson was having over the breeding rights to a horse called Rock Of Gibraltar.

The man I met was short, stocky and plainly from the London area. We sat down at a table and started drinking coffee. He wasted no time. He wanted to know all about Ferguson. His gambling, any scandal there might be about transfers involving United and even whether he had had any affairs.

Rather naively, I asked what the point of all this digging into Sir Alex's life was. "It's a private job and it's got to be done quickly," said the investigator. How quickly, I asked? "Yesterday," he replied.

"What can you tell me about Fergie's gambling? We're very interested in pursuing any leads on that . . . We've got the resources to look into that properly - we can get around the world." Despite the global ambition on display, the first question he wanted answered on gambling was rooted in rainy old Manchester: which casinos does Fergie like to frequent around town?

Then we were on to transfers. "Which transfers haven't really been looked into yet?" he asked, keen for a steer into uncharted territory. "Is there anyone abroad you'd recommend going to see?" He pressed hard for the names of any football agents that might be best to approach.

"Anything to do with Fergie's sons would be interesting, but particularly Jason as his transfers have questions around them, don't they?" he added. I was asked if I was suspicious about any transfers in particular.

An email sent to me later by the same man on September 5 last year reiterated the request. It read: "The foreword to the Crick book thanked members of the board who had ignored requests not to talk to you - would you be able to give me any clues as to the identity of those board members?" At the bottom of the email was an attempt to reassure me: "Neither I nor my colleagues reveal sources to anyone."

Funny that he was prepared to protect his own sources but was keen to ask others to reveal theirs, I thought. And then they turned to women. "Do you know anything worth pursuing?" he asked. I had no idea.

I was offered cash for information - or a job on the project. I must confess that although I found the whole exercise slightly distasteful, I was naturally very interested as a Fergie-watcher in what they might come up with. Would they unearth some dark secret that Michael Crick and I had never come across? I said I would be happy to offer my opinion on whether any of the stories they found had credibility but I never got the call.

Within a week of our meeting a good contact of mine, a Manchester United insider, received a visit. The people he met were different, but they were working on the same team. "This was dirt-digging on Fergie, specifically on Fergie, and nothing more," he told me. "It was pretty unsubtle . . . They said 'We want to know everything about Jason Ferguson . . . We want to build up a profile, get into him.'"

They moved on to questions about Ferguson's gambling. My contact said he didn't know and politely said he couldn't help them.

His account of that Manchester meeting made me feel uneasy. I resolved to find out what was behind all the questions. I rang up the cockney man who had made most of the running:

"Who are you working for?" I asked.

"Haven't you read the papers recently?" was all he would say.

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