The case dates back to 2012, when Abidal recovered from liver cancer and needed a transplant. The donor was Gerard Armand, also from France, who traveled to Barcelona to undergo the operation. Armand was initially said to be his cousin, and this was officially reported in the reports, until 2017. When the court arrested Sandro Rosell for an alleged corruption case – from which he would eventually be acquitted after spending two years in prison The Pandora’s box was opened. One of the telephone conversations between them detected a dialogue between Rosell and Castillo in which they directly admitted that they had bought “an illegal liver” for the player. In 2012, Rosell was the Barça president.
Judge Carmen Lamela, in charge of Rosell’s instruction in the Rimet case, opened a separate piece to investigate the case. Initially the investigations concluded that everything was in order and the case was shelved. But in 2018 there was a twist. All documents were analyzed with a magnifying glass and irregularities were found in the signing of one of the papers of the procedure. The prosecution asked to reopen the case and when it was already underway again, in 2019 it summoned Abidal to testify. The former footballer – then Barça’s technical secretary – denied any irregularities and insisted that Armand was his cousin. The donor, in turn, agreed to undergo a medical examination to verify that he had donated the liver from the transplant.
With the arrival of the pandemic the case was stopped, but now it has resumed. According to reports, there is no doubt that Gerard Armand is the donor, but there is some doubt about kinship. Toxicology has not found any scientific evidence after analyzing the tissues, and this opens the door to the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office, that the donation was not from a relative in an altruistic way, but would have been in exchange for some kind of consideration, which is strictly prohibited. The next step is to try to determine if the donor charged for the transplant and, if so, find out who took care of it. The case, far from being clarified, gets tangled up with each passing day.
