FC Barcelona denies that Laporta and his board collected illegal commissions abroad

FC Barcelona has described as “false” and “implausible” the news about the alleged collection of illegal commissions abroad by the club’s former president Joan Laporta and his board, following the complaint presented by a member before the National Court (AN), and regretted that this publication could alter the result of the presidential elections on March 15.

According to El Periódico, a member of FC Barcelona presented a complaint against Laporta and the acting president Rafael Yuste before the National Court last Friday; the former institutional vice president and person responsible for the management of Espai Barça, Maria Elena Fort; and, among others, Eduard Romeu, former economic vice president, for the alleged collection of “undue commissions” through companies in Spain, Cyprus, Dubai, Croatia and Estonia.

In this sense, the club reported that on January 15, 2026, journalists from two media outlets and the organization ‘Organized Crime&Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)’ contacted FC Barcelona to compare information and “alleged documents that would prove or be the basis of the facts that appear today in the published news.”

Said documentation was analyzed and Barça was able to confirm that the information was “implausible and unrelated to reality”, and that it was based, presumably, on “false or seriously manipulated documentation”. For this reason, on January 19, he responded to this organization and to the journalists, expressly indicating that “the information they wanted to verify was totally and absolutely false and that the documents on which they said it was based, without a doubt, must be false and/or manipulated.”

As FC Barcelona has learned, this “false” information would have been offered to many other national media outlets, and it expressed its ignorance of the details of the complaint presented to the AN by the entity’s partner, but that the details published by El Periódico coincide with the information denied on January 19.

Likewise, FC Barcelona reported that, if the identity of the facts is confirmed, it will initiate legal actions against the member for the presentation of a false complaint, forgery of documents and slander, and will urge its Disciplinary Commission to open a disciplinary file against him, regardless of whether the complaint is admitted for processing or not.

Likewise, he announced that he will study actions against the media outlet that published the news for doing so “knowing that the complaint is based on false information and documentation” and that he will act “with total firmness and completeness” against those who “take for granted information that is totally false.”

Furthermore, FC Barcelona will make available to the Electoral Board all the information it has on this matter “for the purposes of verifying the reality of the situation and warning the pre-candidates of the consequences of the use of false news and information during this electoral process.”

Finally, he regretted that this publication occurred in the midst of an electoral context and understands that this action could respond to an “illegitimate attempt” to alter the normal development of the electoral process, “with the intention of conditioning or manipulating” the sovereignty of his partners.