Yesterday the Mossos d’Esquadra broke into the headquarters of the Catalan Football Federation, in Carrer Sicília in Barcelona, ??to look for documentation on alleged irregularities committed by the candidacy of president Joan Soteras in the last elections to preside over the body of Catalan football . Sabadell District Court 2, after receiving the complaint from several clubs, ordered the search of the Federation headquarters. It is being investigated whether Soteras and his companions falsified notarial acts in order to delegate the vote in their favor in the elections of February 2023. The judge has charged seven people whose mobile phones were removed to proceed with their emptying. They are the president of the Federation, Joan Soteras, the general director, José Miguel Calle, and five other senior officials of the organization.
Justice suspects that Soteras, ex-president of Sabadell, allegedly used the requirements imposed by the Catalan Sports Court by which the president or vice-president of a club could authorize another person, by means of a power of attorney, to vote on their behalf his. For this reason, it was necessary to prove by means of a certificate before a notary that the president of the club was indeed one. The investigation has obtained indications that Soteras would have used the personal data of the presidents of the clubs recorded in the database of the Federation to make the certificate of the club and request the power of attorney to authorize himself the power to vote for your candidacy. In total, nearly 171 acts of this type were obtained in the last elections to the Catalan Federation, all signed before a Sabadell notary and with correlative numbers, which would indicate that they would have been signed one after the other. The judge keeps the case open for the crimes of falsification of a public document, falsification of a private document and disloyal administration. The participation of some senior officials of the entity in the alleged falsification of documents and the connection of the Sabadell notary with the alleged fraud is being investigated. One of the lines aims to clarify the participation of the Federation’s executive positions in case they could have maneuvered from within the organization in favor of Soteras’ candidacy in exchange for per diems. The Mossos have spent the last year visiting the presidents of the 171 clubs that delegated the vote to Soteras to corroborate whether the signature on the documentation was indeed theirs. There have been cases where presidents have denied that they signed anything and claimed that they had forged their rubric.
The Catalan Federation, after ten hours of searching, issued a rare statement in which it undertook to collaborate with the investigation and made itself available to the Mossos d’Esquadra. “From tomorrow (today) the board of directors and the federative workers will be able to return to their workplaces”, he added.
This is not the first scandal that has plagued the Soteras board of directors. In the May 2022 elections, which the Catalan Sports Court later ordered to be repeated because irregularities had been detected, there were club presidents who reported that their identities had been impersonated to delegate the vote to Soteras. A court in Tortosa is investigating the impersonation of the president of an indoor soccer club in the Terres de l’Ebre whose signature was allegedly forged. “No one from the club went to vote, nor have we signed any power of attorney for them to vote on our behalf,” said the president.
The Mossos, in addition, have on the table another suspicious and recent matter linked to the Catalan Football Federation. On New Year’s Eve, the organization’s headquarters was the victim of a mysterious robbery in which individuals seized the safe that allegedly contained sensitive documentation. The managers of the board of Soteras denounced that inside there was confidential documentation of the Soule case, which investigates the plots of corruption linked to the Spanish Federation of Ángel María Villar. A strange case, since the instruction is practically finished.
In a first statement to justify the incident, the Federation assured that the federative activity was interrupted due to problems in the electricity supply, but then issued another statement in which it asserted that it had been the victim of a robbery with the method of the rififí Sources close to the organization assure that the safe that was stolen was one and a half meters long and weighed 300 kilos, so the complications of the thieves to take the safe, load it and transport it can be deduced from the second floor where the Federation is located to the ground floor of a building without an elevator. Soteras management then assured that the thieves knew perfectly well the facilities, the layout of the offices and who worked there.
