If one thing is clear throughout the police investigatory report on the Barçagate case, to which ElNacional.cat has had access, it is the evidence pointing to a person as a clear ideologue and director of the whole plan to whitewash the image of the then-president of the Barça club, Josep Maria Bartomeu, by means of fake Twitter accounts. That person was Bartomeu's right-hand man in running the Catalan football club, Jaume Masferrer. He also figured out how to pay for the plot through the club without it being easily detected.
Through statements made by employees, both of the club and of the companies contracted to do the media work, as well as analysis of the bank accounts via which the payments were made, the Mossos d'Esquadra police have detected the use of "bridge accounts", and another possible crime: tax fraud, because in many of the invoices VAT was not declared or paid.
A former employee of I3 Ventures was key in explaining how the illicit project was set up. Acoording to Victor Vallès, I3 Ventures previously had only four employees and tackled one-off projects. In 2017, the Barça contracts arrived. It was the one single project which made the company viable. The workforce expanded from 4 to 10 workers. And the order was given that all the work had to be done from Barcelona, although Latin American companies, specifically Big Data, NSG Chile and Tantrasoft, took part from time to time.
"In some cases, they had no other income than the payments from FC Barcelona, and in others, practically all their income came from FCB," says the Mossos d'Esquadra report. "After receiving the Barça payment, this money was transferred to the I3 Ventures account, via a device which functioned as a bridge account, providing a firewall to make it difficult to identify the real beneficiary of the money and hide the fact that the payments went to I3 Ventures,” they conclude.
Thus, Barça paid money into accounts of some companies abroad which was then transferred to an I3 Ventures account. The representative of all the accounts was Rodrigo Martín Ziegner, the same person who signed the first contract with Barça.
The Mossos twigged that something was amiss when, after the ex-employee's statement assuring that the work was done from the Barcelona company, Barça ended up paying other companies. In total, the I3 Ventures account received 1,114,627.11 euros from the accounts of the other companies, according to the investigators. After that, 51,452 euros were withdrawn from this account, always in cash, and in amounts of 1,000 or 1,500 euros.
Police believe there is enough evidence to lay a tax fraud charge, because the invoices paid to foreign companies did not include the added VAT, which was included on I3 Ventures invoices.
The researchers conclude that "there is a 'single till' principle based on a fictitious business group, with a single order being split into different contracts and invoices, when the service provider is really a single company making use of a simulated structure".
In fact, when the Mossos checked the addresses of the alleged companies, they found residential homes or open spaces where there were no businesses. For example, IT Uruguay was located on a tree-covered site occupied only by a battered old campervan.
"The [Barça] directors who were members of the adjudication committee never received these contracts, and in the compliance committee these suppliers were never analyzed. In conclusion, all this contracting was hidden from the board of directors and all the club's auditing bodies."
Details hidden from the board
Among Masferrer's manoeuvres to hide operations at the club was a new system of validation for allegedly confidential contracts. Former Barça CFO Montserrat Font explained this to the police. She directly accused Romà Gómez Ponti of devising a parallel system to avoid the club's control mechanisms.
All the directors questioned by the Mossos d'Esquadra denoed that they had any knowledge of these contracts and even suggested that the audit that was carried out, precisely to clarify the case internally, did not reveal the whole truth.