2023-09-26 19:55:40
BarcelonaSandro Rosell has been charged with a criminal offense five times. And the five times he has been acquitted; despite the fact that in one of them, in which he was investigated for corruption with the purchase and sale of the rights of the Brazilian national team, he spent two years locked up in provisional prison waiting to be released. The latest, this Tuesday, when the Barcelona Court confirmed the businessman’s acquittal for tax fraud. A case, the latter, for which the Prosecutor’s Office asked for almost three years in prison.
The decision reaffirms the sentence that was already issued a year ago by the criminal court number 3 of Barcelona, and which had been appealed by both the Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office. Rosell was accused of defrauding the Treasury of 230,591 euros in 2012. At the oral trial, Rosell referred to the supplementary statement he made in 2019, when he acknowledged the debt to the Treasury, returned the money with the corresponding interest and assured that “there had been no bad faith”. In fact, his lawyer, Pau Molins, insisted on a “change of opinion” from the Treasury and assured that his client did not want to hide anything. Days later, justice ruled in favor of the former president of Barça, and a year later the Court of Barcelona put an end to the case.
Rosell was also the protagonist this Tuesday, in a judicial key, for a case in which he was also acquitted. A complaint by Jaume Roures, founding partner of Mediapro, who accused Rosell of being behind the industrial espionage suffered by Roures, whose email was hacked and more than 11,000 emails were read. Rosell always denied the facts and in 2019, three years after the complaint, he was left out of the case for lack of evidence. This Tuesday the trial began in Barcelona, in which Rosell appeared as a witness.
Rosell spent two years in pre-trial detention before being acquitted
But the most famous case of all is the one that corresponds to the Rimet operation. Rosell was arrested in 2017 and spent two years in pre-trial detention awaiting trial, which in 2019 found him not guilty of the crimes he was being investigated for. Specifically, the collection of illicit commissions for the sale of the audiovisual rights of the Brazilian soccer team, and the subsequent laundering of this capital through shell companies in tax havens. In fact, Rosell was released on the second day of the trial, right after testifying. A few weeks later the verdict was issued exonerating the Barcelona businessman.
Rosell, who has always said he feels like a victim of Operation Catalunya, was prosecuted twice more for cases related to Barça. More specifically, the signing of Neymar, which was completed when he was president of the club. In the first instance, where he was accused of tax fraud in the recruitment of the Brazilian, in 2016 an agreement was reached with the Prosecutor’s Office in which Barça became responsible for the crime while Rosell and also the then president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, were exonerated.
The other litigation, also following the signing of Neymar, was an alleged corruption between individuals to camouflage the real cost of the operation so that DIS, an investment fund that had part of the player’s federation rights, charged less money than they supposedly belonged to him. In 2022 he was acquitted, in a trial that ended precisely with the Prosecutor withdrawing the charges for all the accused.
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