2023-04-19 16:34:35
Joan Laporta’s Barça is once again attacking the club’s previous board of directors led by Josep Maria Bartomeu. FC Barcelona has presented a opinion expert, to which EL PERIÓDICO has had access, from the Iberian Press groupin the court investigating the Barçagate case about alleged unfair administration and corruption in which he ensures that the entity paid 1.1 million more for the monitoring service of the news and comments about the club that appeared on the internet and social networks between 2017 and 2020.
The opinion concludes that the contracting of this work to companies of the NS Group conglomerate, among them I3 Venture, “lacks rationality from the technical-economic point of view” and that the reports they sent to the club contained “abundance of data, little information and very little applicable knowledge.” Bartomeu’s lawyer, Jose Maria Fuster Fabrahas stated that they are waiting for the Mossos d’Esquadra to deliver their final report to present their expert opinion.
The analysis of FC Barcelona delivered now in court maintains that the annual cost that Barça would have had to pay for the work of monitoring social networks and the internet “should not reach 400,000 euros” per year in any case. That is, 1.2 million euros in the three seasons (2017-2020) in which the different companies of the NS Group were hired.
The club, details the opinion, signed contracts with this group in the first year for 1,107,500 euros and in the second and third for 947,700 euros each period, a total of just over three million euros. However, not all this amount was paid, when the agreement was terminated, and the Barcelona entity ended up disbursing 2.3 million euros, a much higher sum, in the opinion of the expert, for the cost of these tasks, including the benefit of 25 % for NS Group.
The usefulness or not of the work
The opinion questions the usefulness of the reports made by NS Group on that control of social networks. None of the FC Barcelona workers interviewed knew about the services contracted by the club to the companies, although he admits that one of the employees claimed in his court statement that he was aware of some of these studies, but that “he was categorical in saying that he did not use them given his futility”. The expert argues that if these periodic reports prepared by that company do not reach the club’s technical teams “they could not be implemented and had no practical application.”
In his opinion, “no visibility was given in the hiring process for technicians of Barça, “as is usually done” and, therefore, “technical and human duplications” could not be detected that would have made recruitment “efficient”. The expert stresses that many aspects of these services could have been carried out internally in the entity. Specifically, he points out that Barça then had profiles with the necessary skills to carry out these tasks.
an internal routine
In this sense, the expert opinion underlines that Barça “already had been carrying out your daily routine” of monitoring, data extraction, analysis and implementation services around conversations on the internet, publications in digital media and profiles on social networks that talk about the entity. “Therefore”, he adds, “it is not understood how the internal technical organization chart of FC Barcelona was not taken into account” for the contracting of NS Group.
In none of the signed contracts “previous analyzes are attached” that justify the order that was carried out, in the opinion of the expert. “No official requests have been found by the people responsible for the Barcelona departments in the period analyzed, evidencing the needs for which these contracts were launched,” he stresses. In addition, he indicates that there were other technical solutions that were cheaper than those finally used by NS Group.
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