Last Tuesday, the Mossos detonated the operation for alleged fraud of Joan Soteras’ candidacy in the Catalan Football Federation elections, but in reality they had been checking for a year whether the notarial acts to delegate the vote were simulated. A Sabadell judge has charged the Federation leadership after the police found several club presidents whose signatures had been forged.
One of them was Josep Ignasi Estany, president of Atlètic Club Banyoles, a team from the Catalan fourth division, who testified before the Mossos in October 2023 and confirmed that his signature had been forged by the candidacy of the president of the Federation. Estany went to vote in the last elections held in February 2023. In his case, he had the data of his board of directors updated in the registry of Catalan sports entities, an essential step to be able to vote, but the information was not updated in the census of the Federació Catalana, so he had to go to a notary to issue a document proving that he was the president of the club and had the right to vote.
The candidacies of Joan Soteras – the winner on whom all suspicions hung – and Juanjo Isern, opposition candidate, offered the club leaders to issue the certificates at their own expense. The president of Atlètic Club Banyoles made the notarial act with Isern’s candidacy and went to vote with the certificate under his arm in person at the headquarters of the Girona delegation.
His surprise was that upon entering the building a member of the Soteras candidacy gave him a document issued by a notary office in Sabadell to which he had never been and signed by him. “They forged my signature thinking that I would not go to vote,” the president explains to La Vanguardia. “Their objective was to win votes with the clubs that had not shown up to vote,” he explains. The mechanism being investigated is whether Soteras had the notarial records of more than a hundred clubs prepared to vote on his behalf in case they did not appear.
In April, two months after the elections and with accusations of fraud coming from the opposition, the Soteras board sent a WhatsApp to some presidents to clarify that they had voluntarily given up their vote to the winning candidate. The message said the following: “The club’s board of directors by a large majority authorized Joan Soteras to make public before a notary our accreditation as a representative of the club and whatever steps were necessary to be able to exercise the right to vote in the elections to the Catalan Federation. soccer”. Yesterday, Juanjo Isern issued a statement to denounce the “negligent management” of the organization’s leaders. “We are facing the biggest case of electoral corruption in the history of Catalan football,” he lamented.
