The eighth section of the Barcelona Court has confirmed the acquittal of Sandro Rosell for a tax crime issued a year ago by court number 3 of the Catalan capital. It is the fifth criminal acquittal of the former Barça president. The string of cases opened against him and the systematic closure without conviction or directly with file without even going to trial encourage the suspicion, denounced by the businessman, that they were part of a civil liquidation plan within the framework of the Catalunya operation against the independence movement, a kind of dirty war of the PP government against the process.
In this last case, the businessman was accused by the Tax Agency and the State Attorney’s Office of an alleged tax crime committed in 2012 when declaring income for professional services through a company for a fee of 200,000 euros. These charges were always declared and the services actually provided, as recognized by the sentences, and it was a difference of interpretation, but a prison sentence was requested, even when in the same inspection there was another company with partners who acted in the same way and no accusation was made.
Another unusual fact in the case was that the inspection was communicated to Rosell when he was in the Soto del Real penitentiary center – by order of the judge of the National Court Carmen Lamela – to which the Tax Agency officials attended. It must be remembered that the businessman was imprisoned for almost two years for an alleged case of money laundering and criminal organization of which he was also acquitted in April 2019. According to the former president of Barça, in these years the Tax Agency has carried out up to 75 procedures against him. .
At the hearing of the tax trial to which the Court’s order now refers, Rosell’s defense lawyer, Pau Molins, linked both cases to the beginning of the Catalunya operation: “Until in 2010 he became president of FC Barcelona, Rosell had never had any problem with the justice system or with the Treasury.” From that moment on, however, all their problems began, specifically as a result of a conversation at that time between the president of the Catalan PP, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, and commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, in which the former ordered the latter that Sandro Rosell be investigated “for his alleged connections with the independence movement.” The conversation mentioned by Molins between the politician and the police officer took place on November 6, 2012 and all the cases opened against the businessman were opened after that date.
The first case against Rosell, which led him to preventive detention for almost two years, began with the arrival of a rogatory commission from the New York Prosecutor’s Office, in June 2015, requesting information about his banking movements, although without requesting any specific action. , neither account seizures nor judicial actions. If he did so, however, against other people under investigation who, however, were never bothered by the Spanish justice system. The Prosecutor’s Office launched the operation that led him to prison, with the always disturbing report of the famous 3rd group of the UDEF, and presented his complaint in March 2017, when he had already received a second request in which the Prosecutor’s Office of New York reported that Rosell did not appear on its list of defendants but the others did. Despite this, the case remained alive, certainly without activity, but with Rosell imprisoned, until the hearing and the court issued the acquittal, in April 2019.
Three other acquittals are linked to the period in which Rosell served as president of Barça, two of them derived from the hiring of Neymar in June 2013. The last judicial matter linked to the presidency of Barça in which he was acquitted was the complaint of Jaume Roures, president of the Mediapro production company, for alleged espionage, presented in 2016. The Barcelona Court decided to archive Rosell’s accusation for not having “sufficient grounds.” Precisely, this week the oral hearing of the case against two former computer scientists, from Barça and Mediapro, begins.
Rosell still has two more open court cases left. The first referred to the liver transplant that the then Barça player Eric Abidal underwent in 2012.
Finally, Rosell is being investigated for payments of 7.3 million euros by FC Barcelona to José María Enríquez Negreira, vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees, between 1994 and 2018, therefore also during the mandate of the Barcelona businessman (2010- 2014). An investigation opened much more recently, in May of last year, when the Tax Agency reported the facts to the Prosecutor’s Office.
