The scandal over the alleged identity theft of footballer Edgar Ié, deceiving his club, Dinamo Bucharest, has turned out to be fake news, “a slander” and a “falsehood”, as stated by the Romanian club in an official statement. issued this Monday afternoon.
The Bucharest club strongly denies having been the subject of deception by its player, signed on February 18. According to what had been spread on social networks and by various media outlets, defender Edgar Ié, 30 years old, with a Blaugrana past (from 2012 to 2016 he played in the lower categories), had allegedly played in his place, in five games, to his twin brother Edelino.
In the official statement of Dinamo Bucharest, the club points out that the alleged impersonation of Edgar Ié, a 1.82 m central defender by his brother Edelino Ié, a 1.80 m right winger, is “fake news, which appeared on Facebook on the day of the match against UTA Arad [on Sunday], it was broadcast in a few hours by the Romanian media and picked up by the international press, such as the BBC, Marca or Record.”
Dinamo Bucharest is offended in its statement by the image that has emerged from the club with this information.
“Dinamo Bucharest hired Edgar Miguel Ié, a community player, through a business firm recognized in Europe. We are talking about transparency, about legality in the first place,” says the Romanian club, which claims to have signed the player with the relevant certificates from the Romanian Football Federation and FIFA.
Likewise, the Bucharest club announces that it has initiated actions “to bring the author of this erroneous information to court for serious damage to the club’s image.”
The information about the alleged impersonation of Edgar Ié spread like wildfire this Monday through social networks and media outlets that echoed the alleged scandal.
According to the Romanian journalist Daniel ?endre, the Dinamo Bucharest board, which opened an investigation, began to suspect the deception when they noticed that the supposed Edgar Ié, central defender, only communicated in Portuguese, and not at all in English, despite of being a true football globetrotter, who has played in Spain (Barça and Villarreal), France (Lille and Nantes), Turkey (Trabzonspor and Basaksehir) and the Netherlands (Feyenoord), before joining Dinamo on the 18th. of February.
The club’s distrust of its player would have grown, according to information from Romania, when they asked him for his driving license to deliver a car from a sponsor and the player refused.
Voices even appeared in Romania, such as that of the former president of Dinamo Bucharest, Florin Prunea (who was a goalkeeper for the Romanian team in the 1994 World Cup in the USA), considering the news to be true. “It seems surreal. I started making phone calls, talking to friends and the news is true, I can’t believe it. Nobody denied it. I found out that he has a twin brother who also plays soccer,” Prunea said.
In the first statements about the alleged scandal, the protagonist, Edgar Ié, denied having participated in any identity theft plot, as stated on the Twitch channel Jijantes. “The news is false, I would never do something like that,” the Portuguese defender commented to journalist Gerard Romero.
