HARRY REDKNAPP believed he was the subject of innuendo and continued investigation into his financial affairs because he spoke with a cockney accent and was called “Harry”, Southwark crown court in London has been told.

The Tottenham Hotspur manager had told investigators looking into corruption in the Premier League in 2006 that he was “sick and tired” of suspicion repeatedly falling on him.

A jury heard yesterday that he had told Nigel Layton from the firm Quest, which was conducting the investigation into alleged “bungs” associated with Premiership transfers, that a friend had told him: “Harry, I can’t believe it’s always you. The problem with you is you’re named Harry and you have a cockney accent.”

“People don’t know me,” Redknapp had continued, “and I’m getting sick and tired of it. If there’s any mud to be thrown I seem to be on the end of it, for some reason.”

Redknapp had previously been under investigation in relation to a £300,000 (€358,000) bonus he had received while manager of West Ham, after selling the player Rio Ferdinand to Leeds United. He later moved to Portsmouth FC.

Questioned by Layton on November 6th, 2006, he had disclosed that he had an offshore account in Monaco which he had opened in 2002 in order to receive a payment from his then chairman at Portsmouth, Milan Mandaric, of $145,000 (€110,326). A second deposit of $150,000 (€115,358) was later paid in by Mandaric.

The two men are accused of cheating the public finances by avoiding paying tax and national insurance on the sums, which the Crown says should be regarded as part of Redknapp’s remuneration while manager of Portsmouth.

They deny the charges.

Layton told the court that the Quest inquiry had no powers to compel managers, players and agents to reveal details of their finances, but that Redknapp had “voluntarily” allowed him to examine some of his bank details.

He told John Kelsey-Fry QC, acting for Redknapp, that the manager had given “complete co-operation”, and that the payments from Mandaric to Redknapp into the Monaco account had been outside the scope of the Quest investigation.

Earlier, the jury of four women and eight men had been told that the explanations offered by Redknapp and Mandaric as to the reasons behind the payments were “contradictory, inconsistent and lacking in credibility”.

Redknapp has insisted that the sums were paid as part of his bonus entitlement after selling another player, Peter Crouch. Mandaric, however, told investigators they were a “personal gesture – away from football, away from Portsmouth”, in which he lent Redknapp the money as capital for him to invest, with any profits going to the manager.

Completing his opening remarks, prosecutor John Black QC, asked the jury to consider a succession of issues including: Redknapp’s decision to use a codename for the Monaco account, his failure to notify Revenue and Customs for six years, and his repeated acceptance of Portsmouth FC’s liability to pay tax on employment-related payments.

He asked the jury to consider Mandaric’s suggestion the money was a gift and his later efforts to make it appear to be a loan.

Black described a letter sent by the former Portsmouth chairman to Redknapp asking for repayment of $145,000 (€92,900) as an “attempt to create a paper trail”, adding that if avoiding tax was “that easy then any self-owned business could slash its wage bill” by paying employees’ wages out of the owner’s personal account, then claiming they were gifts made out of “love and affection”.

The jury was played tapes of a number of telephone interviews between a former News of the World journalist and Mandaric and Redknapp in 2009, in which the journalist admitted he had used “flattery, friendship and a bit of kidology” to persuade them to tell him more about the offshore account.

Asked to define “kidology”, Rob Beasley, then chief sports writer at the newspaper, described it as “a situation where you allow people to maybe believe that you have more information than you actually do”.

He told the court he had paid £8,000 (€9,558) to a confidential source who had supplied details of the payments and alerted him that Redknapp was believed not to have paid tax on the sums. Asked by Kelsey-Fry whether his source was a member of City of London Police or of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, both of which were engaged in an investigation into the men, he said: “Absolutely not.”

A story based on his interviews was published in the now defunct newspaper on October 4th, 2009, in which he reported that Redknapp was set to be questioned again by HMRC officials over his offshore accounts, and that lawyers and investigators were planning a summit to consider how best to proceed, the court heard.

The case continues.