They figure in up to € 1.2M the loss to Barcelona for the ‘Barçagate’

A report from the Mossos d'Esquadra to which El País has had access and which appears in the judicial investigation opened by the court of instruction number 13 of Barcelona against the former Barça president Josep María Bartomeu and three other executives, reveals that the leaders of Barcelona “exceeded their powers of administration” by hiring the company I3 Ventures to defame club players and critics of the Bartomeu board. In addition, the Mossos report concludes that Barcelona paid a “surcharge” for these services and they calculate the “damage” caused “to the entity and to the entire social mass” at a figure between 843,000 and 1.2 million euros.

In their report the Catalan police warn that the money paid in three years (since 2017) to the NiceStream group (of which the I3 Ventures company is part) amounts to 2.3 million. The contracted services are the monitoring of the reputation of the club in networks, but also “an allegedly particular use in social networks”, of the defamatory accounts created in social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to attack players of the first team, opponents of the board of directors and rivals of Bartomeu.

According to information from El País, the Mossos believe that these contracts could constitute a crime of unfair administration. And they warn that Bartomeu and the other three executives arrested on Monday they may also have committed a crime of corruption between individuals. The police handle the hypothesis that “managers, administrators, workers or collaborators” may have received “compensation” for awarding contracts outside of the established procedures.