Open Camp was presented as the first major theme park dedicated to sports, intended to revitalize the then underused Olympic ring of Montjuïc. In 2014, the founder of the project, Paco Medina, agreed on the bases of the project with the municipal company BSM, with Xavier Trias being mayor. However, the scenario changed completely after the 2015 municipal elections.
The park opened in June 2016 and operated for just over a year, when the company went bankrupt. Medina filed a complaint against councilors Gerardo Pisarello, Jaume Asens and Eloi Badia for alleged crimes of coercion, extortion, falsehood, fraud, prevarication, bribery and illegal financing of a political party. After the filing of the complaint – to which La Vanguardia has had access – the businessman has just filed an appeal.
The project was planned as the first sports theme park with around twenty sports leisure experiences, with advanced technology simulators and a wide variety of disciplines. The goal was to exceed 1.2 million visitors per year. The park involved an initial investment by Open Camp of 7.1 million, “to improve positioning, valuation and facilities.”
Gaudí Innovation, together with small operators and investors, created the Open Camp startup with the corporate purpose of promoting and developing, nationally and internationally, the repositioning of the Montjuïc sports facilities. In June 2014, the municipal company BSM concluded the rental contract for the transfer of the use and management of the Olympic Stadium and the Olympic Ring Esplanade for 230 days a year for five years. The objective was to take advantage of the enormous influx of tourists who had free access to the Olympic Stadium. BSM and Open Camp committed to jointly promote commercial development.
After the 2015 elections, the new municipal government urges Open Camp to implement “a series of arbitrary functional and commercial demands and to deny the necessary municipal authorizations and permits,” the complaint states. Among them, the commercial unavailability of the main spaces and areas of the Olympic Stadium, “the illegal requirement to condition municipal authorizations to the prior employment contract of certain people and groups” or “allowing free entry and free circulation on the main floor of the stadium.” Estadi Olímpic, which reduced the revenue forecast.
One of the Open Camp initiatives, the opening of the world’s first Paralympic museum, had to be suspended, “and in its place we were required to produce a blatant partisan exhibition of the 1936 Popular Anti-Fascist Front Olympics,” says Medina. An investment of 726,000 euros in a marketing campaign “in which we were censored for using the term ‘theme park'” was also frustrated, the complaint states. The development of the project was seriously affected and so was the financing. “The preconceived stoppage of Open Camp activity caused the dismissal of 252 workers, the loss of 11.4 million by 68 supplier companies and the 31 million that the 24 promoter companies had invested.”
In the appeal, Medina cites 88 facts, provides 225 documents (commercial contracts, minutes, opinions, statements, emails…) and summons 18 witnesses. In addition to the four defendants (Pisarello, Badia, Asens and Marta Carranza, former municipal Sports Commissioner), she also cites Open Camp directors and public officials such as Ignasi Armengol, former director of BSM; Adelina Escandell, former president of Fundació L’Alternativa, the then councilor Jaume Collboni or the director of BSM, Marta Labata. The document insists on the Bankruptcy Qualification Report, in which the court recognized that Open Camp “cannot be considered as the cause of the situation, but rather that various exogenous causes have intervened in which different legal and natural persons have intervened.”
