2023-07-06 07:30:25
BarcelonaIt has been three and a half years since the Barçagate case broke out, but the investigation process is still not clear when it will end. Right now, the date set is July 29, but it’s likely to be extended by another six months. If the judge ends up opting for this decision, it will be the fifth extension that the instruction will experience. In fact, as he advanced the What are you playing with? of SER Catalunya and has been able to confirm the ARA, two of those investigated in this case for alleged disloyal administration and corruption between individuals, the former president of Barça Josep Maria Bartomeu and his right-hand man, Jaume Masferrer, have asked that the investigation extend another six months, until January 2024, and have the option to testify after they ruled out doing so when the Mossos d’Esquadra arrested them in March 2021.
Bartomeu and Masferrer do not want to testify until the Mossos d’Esquadra have submitted all their reports, which are being delayed due to the difficulty of the investigators in extracting information from the technological devices of two of the investigated, Oscar Grau, former director general of the Barça, and Masferrer himself. Many messages have been deleted and this complicates the reconstruction of the facts by the police force. In addition, the Mossos state in an information office that forms part of the summary of the case, to which the ARA has had access, that after the publication of the Barçagate news in SER Catalunya on June 17, 2020 “someone from club instructed the head of the IT department (Sergio Jerez) to take the phones of those under investigation and preserve them.” Therefore, what the Mossos are now analyzing “are the phones that replaced them”.
New statement before the judge
For the time being, the Barçagate investigation has seen this Thursday what could be the last statement of a witness in the case before the judge of the court of inquiry number 13 of Barcelona, Alejandra Gil. Mario Ruiz, head of press for Barça training football between 2015 and 2021, has given a statement at the Ciutat de la Justícia de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, where, according to lawyers in the case consulted by the ARA, he has been asked for a WhatsApp conversation he had with Masferrer in which he told him that “everything will be leaked now, the information cannot go into the hands of the judge” after he learned that the complaint of a group of club members for Barçagate in June 2020 and that the judge had requested all the information on the case.
The sources explain that Ruiz, who admitted to the judge that he is a friend of Masferrer, would have replied that he was referring to the fact that documentation should not be leaked in general because he, as a journalist, was aware that if he got to in the hands of the judge, the parties would leak it to journalists, who she considers to be misrepresenting this type of information.
La Masia was one of the areas of the Barcelona club that received diagnostic reports from Nicestream, the business group that had contracts with Barça and that created fake profiles on social networks. Ruiz, always according to the lawyers of the case consulted, would have affirmed during the statement that they had been useful to him (unlike the rest of the former workers of the club who also received them and who have testified before the judge during the investigation of the case ) for the digital growth of La Masia and that, thanks to this, this area of the club had had more international coverage through the publication of information by international journalists. However, the defense points out that the articles would have been published before Ruiz received the diagnostic reports from Nicestream, which would have been in his possession by April 2018 at the earliest.
Payments to journalists, within the cause
On the other hand, the court of inquiry number 13 of Barcelona has included in the Barçagate case the payments that, according to the Mossos, the club would have made to journalists Albert Lesán and Marçal Lorente upon admitting the appeal presented by Barça after having previously accepted the request of the investigated so that this was not part of it. The police believe that Lesán and Lorente received money from the Barça entity through Amalgama Marketing, a Barça supplier company owned by Miquel Sambola. The order for these payments came from the president of the club at the time, Josep Maria Bartomeu.
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