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The club's billionaire owners had stood by the chief executive before but once his lies were exposed he simply had to go

Garry Cook is a brand man, who seemed permanently to be chewing Nike's marketing phrase book, and at the job from which he has now been forced to resign there is a more important brand than the remade Manchester City itself: that of Abu Dhabi.

In a mutation which remains almost surreal three years on, sorry old City have become a remodelled, global marketing image for the land of its owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and his family, who rule it dynastically and so wield its oil fortunes.

There is a marketing theory that when shaping public perceptions an organisation should "tell its best truth" and for Abu Dhabi this is about being seen to conduct their affairs properly, embody respect and so not be viewed merely as a clan of outlandishly lucky Arabs throwing obscene money around.

Mansour's City have always believed in Cook and stuck with him despite his gift for saying the wrong thing but, when they announced a "board-led review" of his email exchange with Nedum Onuoha's mother, it was clear they were taking his conduct extremely seriously and, if his story was rumbled as a lie, he would be gone. As almost everybody has speculated to fill the week between Monday's announcement of the review and Friday's resignation, it was not so much the original crime as the perceived cover-up in the aftermath which did for him.

The first email was a thoughtless crack dashed off to a colleague, clearly never meant for Dr Onuoha via Cook's Reply All click. But while he might have survived that, perhaps by apologising profusely for his crassness, to say instead that his email had been hacked into and the perpetrator found and punished was in itself an arguably more serious offence. As City put it, rather primly, in their statement: "There is foundation to Dr Onuoha's allegations." That meant the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak had to apologise to Dr Onuoha and Cook had to go.

In 2009 the Guardian asked Mubarak why the Abu Dhabi regime had kept Cook on at City, given his "gaffe prone" label which began with that hideous description of the club's former owner, Thaksin Shinawatra, accused of corruption and human rights abuses, as "a nice man to play golf with".

Mubarak answered: "Garry Cook is an individual I highly regard, he is a fantastic person and I think a genuine person. People make mistakes but to me therewas more good than there were mistakes."

So while Cook's public image developed into "gaffe-strewn" following other public slip-ups which were never, in truth, on a par with his Thaksin golf link, inside City the new regime put their faith in him. They described him as honest, genuine, an enthusiast committed to football success via players bought with Mansour's great fortune, commercial expansion of the "brand" combined with a feel for the club itself and its fans, many of whom were supportive of his record this week.

His bosses defended him resolutely against questions about his competence and in the battle in January over Carlos Tevez's reported dissatisfactions and desire to leave the club. Their instincts must have been to back again the man whom Mubarak described as a friend, when Dr Onuoha made her complaint and the emails were exposed on Monday, but they realised instead it was serious enough finally to land the chief executive in terminal trouble. For a regime who state how much they value honesty, integrity, doing the right thing, there was only one outcome to a review into a crummy lie.

The regret expressed by the City board, and which hung around Cook's empty office in the new administrative block built on the Eastlands forecourt, was itself genuine. Mubarak meant it when he said of Cook: "His judgment in this matter should in no way lead to his accomplishments being overlooked," and that: "The club is unrecognisable from the organisation which he inherited."

The organisation which believes it embodies virtues of integrity while most of football looks aghast at the money poured in by the owner, now starts the search forthe next chief executive to take it on.

It is unlikely that John Williams, the former Blackburn chairman now working with Marwood on player sales and contracts, will be that man, nor Peter Kenyon, the former Chelsea chief executive whose name was being floated on Friday. City will look for an experienced executive who can combine zealous commercial ambition with an appreciation of City's identity as a club, and its fans bred on loyalty in failure.

It is a big job and, for all Cook's faults, they believed he was right for it until the emails came to light, 11 months later, exposing wrongdoing they could not tolerate.

David Conn