Barça went to work and 24 hours later announced his replacement: Sergi Atienza, a member of the International Criminal Justice and Human Rights Commission of the Barcelona Bar Association and a lawyer who has been very active for many years. active in the Laporta environment through social media. In fact, he has his consultation as a lawyer in the same building at the top of Avinguda Diagonal from where the Barça president runs the law firm Laporta & Arbós, for which Atienza had worked in the past. For example, the new compliance director drafted with Laporta the appeal to try to stop the club’s pact with the prosecution for the Neymar 1 case, which exonerated Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu from any crime.
Barça is not an easy place. Beyond the short time they last in office, the compliance officers they have to live with a number of internal complaints that quadruples those on average in companies with a similar number of employees to Barça (between 1,000 and 1,500), as this newspaper reported. They receive about twenty a year.
With the arrival of Laporta in the presidency, Mas replaced Mireia Simona as the club’s director of regulatory compliance. Simona, who is currently still in the department, was the solution chosen by Josep Maria Bartomeu’s board when she decided to step down Noelia Romero in the summer of 2020 after conducting an internal investigation into the Barçagate case. Previously, the compliance officer she had been suspended from work and paid for 13 alleged irregularities in the exercise of her office.
a sheltered figure
But in September 2021 his dismissal was deemed inappropriate by a judge. The judgment stated that “the plaintiff was dismissed because the Barça management interpreted her activity in relation to Barçagate as an unacceptable interference in a matter beyond her competence, as this activity had been entrusted to the PwC company ”. During his investigation into the case, Romero received an e-mail from Bartomeu asking for explanations about what he was doing. The Mossos d’Esquadra, in a report that appears in the Barçagate summary, consider that this position could be interpreted “as a pressure on independence”.
Romero is not the only one compliance officer that he was not able to carry out his work at Barça with complete freedom, despite the fact that this figure, according to the experts, needs independence, stability and an exhaustive knowledge of the entity. Sabine Paquer took office in March 2016 and will resign in January 2019. Several sources say she “received pressure on some investigations and did not have all the resources to investigate some issues.” At that time, Barça went through a selection process and President Bartomeu, Vice-President Enrique Tombas and the director Maria Teixidor chose Romero for the post.
