Barcelona President Joan Laporta accused of offering jobs at club to former investors | OneFootball

Barcelona President Joan Laporta is embroiled in a legal battle over the ‘Reus case‘, and a documentary focused on the matter has only cast further aspersions on his handling both of the case, and his management of Barcelona. Laporta has faced accusations of appointing those with personal links to him to positions at the club rather than on merit, and accusations in the documentary certainly speaks to those.

The Reus case centres around Laporta and fellow Barcelona directors (when they were not in office) Joan Olive, Rafa Yuste and Xavier Sala i Marti, who have faced five legal complaints accusing them of a scam. The deal in question involved investing in a company (Core Store), on the promise of a return on investment, which in turn acquired 53% of Reus. The Catalan club, located an hour down the coast from Barcelona, was wound up in 2019, and none of the investors received their money back.

Photo by FC Barcelona

In the documentary, as detailed by Relevo, sisters Paula and Carmen Tartas who invested in Core Store were recorded without their knowledge speaking about what they had been told by intermediary Sandra Sole, who sought out their investment initially. They appear to suggest that Laporta had offered some of the investors who did not get their money back jobs at Barcelona in order to avoid legal action.

“He told us we were going to get paid anyway. I’ll tell Barca to hire you. Everyone at Barca is involved there: his wife, his son, his brother, his cousin… You could be there too. It looked like a Mercadona, but for football, with 3,000 people. That’s what they gave Toni Cruz as compensation for the investment…”

“You don’t have to work; it’s a contract, and they’ll pay you.” Their brother, who also invested €50k, on top of the €400k invested by his siblings, is an artist and they claim “they offered to buy his paintings for the price of the debt, and that Barcelona would buy them.”

The aforementioned Toni Cruz, one of the investors in Core Store, is now a director at Barca One, while Laporta has acknowledged in court that he did employ Sole to seek out investors for Core Store. Laporta has so far denied accusations of fraud though, and the case is still ongoing. It is also not clear what power Laporta had to make hiring choices at the club, given he was not at the club at the time.