Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, presidents of FC Barcelona in two different stages (2010-14, the first; 2014-20, the second), were studying yesterday with their respective lawyers the possibility of suing Javier Tebas, president of LaLiga. They both understand that Tebas tried to incriminate them, through erroneously interpreted documentation and delivered to the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office, in order to suggest their involvement in operations with real estate and movements in “financial institutions and investment banks.” All this, encompassed in the so-called Negreira case.
The reactions to the information from La Vanguardia and Cronicalibre.com, which revealed last Monday the sending of that document by Thebes, therefore follow one another. If on Monday FC Barcelona requested the resignation of the president of LaLiga through a statement, now it is Rosell and Bartomeu who understand that Tebas’s action directly accuses them in the wrong way. It remains to be seen if the strategy of both former presidents when it comes to taking legal action converges or is faced differently. Pau Molins is Sandro Rosell’s lawyer, and José MarÃa Fuster-Fabra is Bartomeu’s. Both the aforementioned lawyers and those representing Ã’scar Grau, Albert Soler and FC Barcelona, ​​all of them investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office in the Negreira case, have met up to two times (the last one, last week) to unify criteria before the legal process already started.
As this newspaper has learned, it is Josep Maria Bartomeu who has decided that he will take legal action against Javier Tebas as long as the investigating judge or the Prosecutor’s Office reject the document that he provided, considering it invalid as evidence. Rosell, for his part, remains awaiting the evolution of the case. One possibility that should not be ruled out is that it is Barça as an entity who takes that step first against Tebas and Rosell and Bartomeu join him later.
In order for the writing provided by Tebas to be rejected, the version of the family of Josep Contreras, the author (now deceased) of the manuscript that the president of LaLiga transferred to the Prosecutor’s Office on February 22, must be corroborated by way of testimony. The manuscript included a series of names that Tebas claimed “may coincide with the names and/or surnames of certain former FCB directors.” He suggested, for example, that the name “Román” accompanied by the word “lawyer” could be referring to Román Gómez Ponti, former head of legal services at the Blaugrana club; that the surname “Rosell” coincided with that of the former president of Barça and that the name “Josep Maria” could correspond to the former president of the Blaugrana Bartomeu.
In reality, the document in question was written decades ago and the names indicated by Tebas referred to Emilio Román, Contreras’ lawyer, Ramon Rosell, an accountant for his companies, and Josep Maria, actually a Banca Catalana employee responsible for the Contreras accounts in the entity.
Josep Contreras, in his day as manager of Barça B, was among those investigated in the Soule case, in which LaLiga is also a private prosecution. It investigates a possible diversion of funds from the Spanish Football Federation at the time when Villar presided over it.