The board of directors of FC Barcelona has felt for a long time that LaLiga, chaired by Javier Tebas, exceeds its limits in its statements, actions and functions. The origin of the conflict, in the eyes of the current board, has existed since the club refused to join the agreement with the CVC investment fund in the summer of 2021. Since then, the relationship between Tebas and Joan Laporta, top leader of the Barça entity, It is practically non-existent – ​​they have not exchanged a word since November – and in the opinion of Laporta and his management team, LaLiga constantly expresses its aversion and antipathy towards the club, especially on issues related to financial fair play or the Super League, a project that Barcelona promotes along with Real Madrid and Juventus.
The anger has reached its highest point with the irruption of the Negreira case. First, because Tebas publicly considered that Laporta should resign. And then due to information published by La Vanguardia in its edition yesterday in which it is verified that LaLiga, the private prosecution in the case, sent a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office in which it wrongly incriminated the former presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell.
Barcelona reacted yesterday to this news with a forceful statement in which it expressed its “outrage”, asked Javier Tebas for a public apology and demanded his resignation, in addition to alerting the rest of the clubs “for practices that do not have any fit in the functions†of a position such as the one he holds.
The practices refer to the letter that Tebas sent to the Prosecutor’s Office, which included a handwritten document from a former member of the Barça social commission, Josep Contreras, now deceased. The employers had access to said document through the summary of the so-called Soule case, for which the former president of the Spanish Football Federation, Ãngel MarÃa Villar, is accused, in which LaLiga also acts as a private prosecution and in which Contreras was one of those investigated.
As this newspaper revealed, Tebas mistakenly linked in said letter the names or surnames that appeared in the Contreras document with the former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, as well as with Román Gómez Ponti, former head of the club’s legal services. Although Tebas stated in his letter that “this part is not speculative, nor does this letter imply the exercise of a specific accusation against anyone”, he did point out that “the names and surnames recorded in the handwritten note may coincide with the names and/or surnames of certain former directors of the FCB†and deduced that the three could be involved in operations with real estate and movements in “financial institutions and investment banksâ€.
However, as this newspaper explained, the Contreras family has clarified that the true identity of the people mentioned in the document has nothing to do with the former presidents of Barça. They point out that the Josep Contreras document was written decades ago and that the names indicated by Tebas refer to Emilio Román, Contreras’ lawyer, and Ramon Rosell, an accountant for his companies, while Josep Maria was an employee of Banca Catalana responsible for the accounts of the deceased in the entity.
Hours after the publication of the news, LaLiga reacted by sending a burofax to this newspaper demanding a rectification, assuring that said information “seriously damages my honor and reputation”, in reference to its president, Javier Tebas.
