Shocking: Barcelona president Joan Laporta hands prosecutors ‘forensic’ evidence of payments made under Bartomeu regime

Barcelona president Joan Laporta has presented a ‘forensic’ report on the club’s finances and said he has passed evidence of payments made “without cause” during the mandate of predecessor Josep Maria Bartomeu to the local prosecution service, reports The Athletic.

After taking charge in 2021, Laporta’s board hired Deloitte to carry out a detailed study, which detected a series of unexplained operations, leading to the hiring of specialist agency Kroll to investigate how the club had been managed in recent years.

A Barcelona statement on Tuesday said: “The Kroll agency was commissioned to carry out a forensic examination of the specific areas of risk signalled in the Deloitte report.

“This study has revealed a series of operations of considerable economic irrationality and, in short, unjustified payments, falsely justified payments or payments of disproportionate amounts, according to the FC Barcelona legal department.

“These seriously contravene the faith entrusted in the operations of the administrators of a social entity, without ruling out that they might also constitute cases of unjust enrichment that require further investigation.”

Barcelona last week said they had passed the findings of this report to the local prosecution service in Catalonia.

Laporta said the prosecution service would now decide if a crime had been committed and whether anybody would face criminal charges.