The defense crosses out the report as “conjectures” and will ask to leave it out of the case
BARCELONA, 12 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A report by the Mossos d’Esquadra in the case of ‘Barçagate’ exposes the suspicions of the investigators that the former director of the club’s legal services Román Gómez Ponti wanted to filter the contracts of the players Leo Messi and Gerard Piqué, and he declared it “repeatedly and with the knowledge, at least” of the former president of the club Josep Maria Bartomeu and the former general manager Òscar Grau.
As stated in the document to which Europa Press has had access, the messages extracted from their mobiles show “an explicit intention to disseminate their employment contracts”, something that the newspaper ‘El Mundo’ later published, according to what ‘El Periódico’ has announced. and is stated in the aforementioned report.
The Mossos believe that Grau and Ponti “wanted and intended to make public the personal data of FC Barcelona workers such as Leo Messi and Gerard Piqué”, and they suspect that Bartomeu knew it directly and therefore they do not rule him out as a possible collaborator in an alleged disclosure crime of secrets.
Defense sources consulted by Europa Press have affirmed that the representatives of Ponti, Grau and Bartomeu will appeal to the judge the incorporation of this report into the case because they consider that its content is not related to the central investigation, and in the same sense they will request to the magistrate to limit what information the Mossos can extract when reviewing the mobile phones of those investigated.
Ponti’s lawyer, Jorge Navarro, has assessed in statements to Europa Press that the report is based on “conjecture” and has remarked that expressing the intention to do something is not proof of having actually done it.
MESSAGES
The report recalls that, in January 2021, ‘El Mundo’ published Messi’s contract with Barça for 555 million, to which “only a small circle of people had access”: the player, his entourage, club executives, staff from the previous board of directors, close advisers, La Liga and exceptionally some public body.
The Mossos have found that, the same day the news was published in ‘El Mundo’, members of the Blaugrana board –and Bartomeu, who had resigned two months earlier– exchanged messages related to the publication in a WhatsApp group.
Bartomeu commented that the news “can only come from the club” and ruled out that the player himself had leaked it. The then director of the club’s legal services, Román Gómez Ponti, replied: “You can’t be such a good person with this sewer rat. The club has given him everything and he has dedicated himself to marking a dictatorship of transfers, transfers , renovations”.
“And above all the accumulation of blackmail and rudeness that the club and those of us who work there have suffered from this hormonal dwarf who owes Barça his life,” continues the message from Gómez Ponti.
Bartomeu said he was “in agreement with many things” and regretted that the news damaged the image of Barça. For his part, the director Oriol Tomàs attributed it to a “part of an electoral strategy” that he attributed to the now president Joan Laporta.
The club opened an internal investigation to clarify who had sent Messi’s contract to ‘El Mundo’ and Ponti confirmed to the club’s then compliance officer that they would sue the newspaper for image damage.
However, for the Mossos, these messages and emails from Ponti “seem a pretext to pretend that they were adopting internal measures to determine who was the author of the leak, even blaming the player himself or Joan Laporta.”
“WOULD NOT BE A BAD IDEA” TO PUBLISH IT
The investigators believe that “it would be a simulation to pretend that they were looking for those responsible for the events, since a few months before, on March 22, 2020, Ponti himself sent an email to Bartomeu (with a copy to Grau), where he He said that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to publish the footballers’ contracts”.
Specifically, the message that Ponti sent to Bartomeu and Grau said: “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to publish the contracts of the millionaires of the first team so that people can publicly repudiate them.”
Another conversation, from August 2020, concerns Gerard Piqué’s contract after he made a statement stating that the club needed structural changes. In this case, Ponti wrote: “We should filter his contracts…”, and calls him a “son of a bitch”.