Barça announce restructuring of board & legal action against Rousaud

Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu has announced a restructuring of the club's board after last week's resignations. 

"The board of directors has approved the appointment of Jordi Moix, as Vice President for Economic and Equity; Pau Vilanova, as institutional vice president; Oriol Tomàs, as Vice President of the Commercial Area; Marta Plana, as Secretary of the Board of Directors; and David Bellver, as treasurer," the club said in a statement on Monday. 

"Javier Bordas will be the director responsible for the football first team, while Xavier Vilajoana will be in charge of Barça B, the youth teams and women's football. The executives responsible for the Compliance Committee will be the Secretary of the Board, Marta Plana, and the treasurer, David Bellver, while Joan Bladé, in addition to continuing to be responsible for the basketball teams, will be responsible for the Control and Transparency Committee."  

The changes come after six directors resigned last week, including the vice presidents Emili Rousaud and Enrique Tombas. Silvio Elías, Maria Teixidor, Josep Pont and Jordi Calsamiglia also stepped down.

ACTION AGAINST ROUSAUD

Barça also confirmed they would be taking legal action against Rousaud after he suggested someone had taken money out of the club as part of the social media scandal which became known as Barça-Gate. 

The club added: "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."