The founder of Open Camp, the sports theme park that opened its doors in June 2016 and had to close them a year later after the company’s bankruptcy, is preparing a collective civil lawsuit to compensate for responsibilities and so that all those affected can be financially compensated for the damages caused. Paco Medina, promoter of this theme park located in the then underused Olympic ring of Montjuïc, maintains that the company failed due to abuses and contractual breaches by those then responsible for the municipal company BSM.
In October of last year, Medina filed a complaint in the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court. Finally, and after filing the case and, this week, also the appeal, the businessman has decided to open civil proceedings. In the criminal complaint, Medina accused the then deputy mayors Gerard Pisarello, Eloi Badia and Jaume Asens of coercion, extortion, falsehood, fraud, prevarication, bribery and illegal financing of a political party. For the businessman, these three councilors orchestrated the “suffocation” of the company that was born in 2014, when, with Xavier Trias as mayor, Open Camp signed the contract with BSM, the municipal company that manages the Olympic ring space and established the conditions of use for the next five years.
Nine months after the filing of the complaint, the Supreme Court chamber “does not consider the criminal nature of the reported events” and has archived the open case against the accused politicians. The Court considers, based on the report prepared by the Prosecutor’s Office, that “there is no sufficient and concrete evidence of criminal responsibility against the accused” and calls on the victims to resort to civil remedies.
Paco Medina is now preparing this collective civil lawsuit so that the 252 dismissed workers and the 92 affected companies “can be financially compensated for the harmful and massive damages caused directly and intentionally by the new municipal leaders using the municipal company BSM for this purpose.” . Medina highlights the “enormous collective damage of workers” many young people, but also “professional experts over 50 years of age who, having trusted in the institutional and legal stability agreed with the municipal company BSM, voluntarily left their previous jobs to join the innovative and internationally awarded sports theme park that, in the end, could not be saved from institutional tourismphobia.”
Of the 92 companies directly affected “by the arbitrariness infringed by the municipal authorities”, 68 were companies and individuals “suppliers of the park who suffered the loss of 11.45 million euros”, maintains Medina. The remaining 24 companies “were entities and individuals promoting the Open Camp park that suffered a total loss, for an economic damage of 31 million,” he adds. For this reason, the civil lawsuit that is being structured by the various victims of the bankruptcy “would reach, on the one hand, the sum of 1,856,430 euros in unliquidated labor compensation and, on the other, the amount of 42.47 million euros. derived from the damages and losses caused to the 92 companies that stopped collecting payments and lost their debts, financing and participation,” Medina quantifies.
