Barcelona Confirm Plans for Legal Action Against Former Vice President Emili Rousaud

?Barcelona have confirmed that they will be taking legal action against former vice president Emili Rousaud for his recent claims about the club’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

A group of six directors, led by Rousaud and fellow vice president Enrique Tombas, handed in their resignations recently and cited the response to the disease as well as the social media scandal which occurred in February as reasons for stepping down. 

Following their departures, ?Barcelona hit back at them for their ‘serious and unfounded accusations’. This scathing statement was seemingly not enough, however, as they have now taken to their ?official website to confirm that legal action will be taken against Rousaud.

La Blaugrana state that they ‘cannot tolerate’ allegations that could have a serious impact on the club. The statement read: “In the face of grave and unfounded allegations made by Mr Emili Rousaud, the club’s former Vice President, in a number of media interviews, the Board of Directors categorically denies any action that could be described as corruption and have agreed to bring the corresponding criminal action accordingly.

“?FC Barcelona cannot tolerate allegations that seriously damage the institution’s image. The criminal action to be taken is in defence of the honour of the club and its employees. The existence of an ongoing audit must put an end to this matter.

“In this regard, the Board wishes to emphasise that in the light of these allegations, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the company in charge of conducting the audit on the monitoring services of social networks contracted by the club, have reiterated that its work is still ongoing and, therefore, is without any provisional or definitive conclusions.

“PWC also said that the audit could not be completed because the current State of Alarm as a result of COVID-19 has had an impact on the development of certain analytical procedures, insofar as they are procedures that must be carried out in person, and that the different lines of research that they have defined in their work have to be able to be carried out with full access to all the documentation and all the information sources requested at the club.

“The Board considers that the great virtue of the audit entrusted to a prestigious company such as PWC is that it will have done a total study of all the issues related to these services, which will determine the correctness or not of the contracted services and, above all, will determine or not the existence of individually determinable behaviours that may have prejudiced the club.”

The news comes as Victor Font, who will be running for the presidency next year, has claimed that the club is heading towards ‘the perfect storm’. With the way Barça are operating at this stage, Font added that the risks have now become ‘gigantic’. 

In an open letter (as quoted by ?the Evening Standard), Font said: “For some time now the project Sí al futur (Yes to the Future, in Catalan) has been warning Barça members that the Club was heading towards the ‘perfect storm’.

“Let’s add an erratic sports policy, the breaking up of the Board of Directors and the significant reduction in income due to the pandemic, and the result is the danger of economic bankruptcy and moral decay in which the Club has settled. Game over.”

Let’