It feels like a lifetime ago when arbitration rather than ambition was the talk of Tyneside. It was going to fall to Michael Beloff to chair the panel that would decide whether the Premier League's conclusion that Saudi Arabia would have to become a director of Newcastle United as part of any proposed takeover was in fact correct.
The private hearing was due to get under way on January 3 earlier this year and last for little more than a week. However, a breakthrough in a piracy row in the Middle East, which saw Saudi Arabia lift a ban on Premier League broadcaster beIN SPORTS, meant arbitration was obviously not required after the takeover finally went through last October.
Given all that has happened since then, it is easy to forget that it was only last year that the previous regime wanted Beloff removed as chair. Beloff had been put forward by Lord Neuberger and Lord Dyson, who were tasked with appointing a chair, because they were representing Newcastle and the Premier League respectively on the three-man panel.
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Neither party raised any objections to Beloff's appointment in October, 2020 but, two weeks later, the Premier League's representatives, Bird & Bird, told Newcastle's solicitors, Dentons, that the QC had previously advised the organising body on four separate occasions - all in excess of two years prior to his appointment.
One such advice, in March, 2017, was in relation to potential amendment to Section F of the Premier League's rules, which concerned the owners' and directors' test. The Premier League's solicitors also disclosed that the legal firm had been involved in a dozen arbitral proceedings in which Beloff had been an arbitrator. Beloff had been appointed by Bird & Bird in three of these arbitral proceedings but two of those appointments were made after the QC accepted his role in this particular arbitration.
None of the above-mentioned had been disclosed by Beloff prior to his appointment and Newcastle ultimately wanted the arbitrator removed after arguing that his previous work for the league 'gave rise to justifiable doubts as to his impartiality'. However, in a public ruling at the High Court in March, 2021, Judge Mark Pelling said Beloff giving this advice 'in excess of three years prior to his appointment would not cause the fair-minded and informed observer, having considered the facts, to conclude that there was a real possibility' that he was 'biased'.
Nick De Marco had been the QC instructed to make the apparent bias challenge in the High Court just a few days before he was due to appear before Beloff once again as an arbitrator in the EFL salary cap case. In conversation with Beloff, in the latest episode of the sports law podcast, De Marco admitted he approached their second meeting 'with some trepidation' as a result. However, Beloff certainly did not hold De Marco's bias challenge from a few days previously against him.
"Being entirely honest, as you would expect me, it frankly never perturbed me at all," Beloff said as the 80-year-old spoke about it for the first time. "That's what happens.
"I do find, with great respect, I've been the subject of apparent bias challenges almost in double figures. In the Court of Arbitration of Sport, it seems to be now endemic and I never quite understand why because unless you actually believe the person is going to be biased, why do you take the point?
"Almost all of them have failed. One actually involved a member of these chambers who I simply had not noticed and came late into the case. I just simply had not noticed that and therefore had not disclosed it so it was more a issue of non-disclosure than of anything else.
"The only other one was a challenge by Sepp Blatter and the fact that challenge succeeded might be said to be more to my credit than to my discredit. But coming back to your other point, you know that it's being done and it happens and people are entitled to do it. In the end, they lost but if they had won, I would not have taken umbrage against the person who advanced the argument anyhow.
"I probably would have admired them for succeeding. I didn't actually think it was likely to succeed but you never know. It was not perhaps as easy as I thought it might have been."
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