The Administrative Court of Sport attributes responsibility for the fraud in Gavin van den Berg’s documentation to the people who declared themselves perpetrators, but not to the entity
The Alcobendas Rugby club cannot be punished for the falsification of player Gavin van den Berg’s documents. This is the South African striker who, being lined up by the Spanish team, caused the national team to be sanctioned and lose its place that it had won for the 2023 World Cup in France. In a resolution known this Thursday, the Administrative Court of Sport, the highest sports instance in our country, upholds the appeal of the Madrid club and annuls the sanctions imposed by the Spanish Rugby Federation (FER).
In the investigation known as a result of the exclusion of Spain from the World Cup due to improper alignment of Van den Berg, the FER, then chaired by Alfonso Feijo, punished Alcobendas Rugby with automatic relegation to the second category and imposed a fine of 30,000 euros. . The garnet team was considered lost in the semifinal of the Copa del Rey, in which they had won on the pitch against Ciencias Enerside in Seville. And he was also excluded from the qualifiers for the league title, in which he did not get to play the match that corresponded to him in the quarterfinals.
The circumstance arises that the Federation, which currently has a new Board of Directors after the early elections as a result of the scandal, will have to find a way to comply with the sentence. For example, in the calendar for the next season, Alcobendas did not appear among the teams in the highest national category. In addition, their direct relegation due to suspension gave rise to the promotion of another team, with which some possible solutions open the way to future disputes.
The TAD resolution establishes that -as the club had argued- cannot be made to the sports entity responsible for a forgery committed “in a very personal capacity” by three of its members. He considers that the club’s responsibility for the acts of its members is not universal, but is limited to conduct such as “incidents in matches, or on the occasion of them, and for conduct that takes place in sports facilities.”
The document signed by the two former first-team coaches, José Ignacio Inchausti and Fernando Dez, and former player Jano Cherr, has been key to exonerate the club. In it they admitted that the latter, at the request of the first two, had manipulated the photocopy of the Van den Berg passport. But they also specified that neither the Alcobendas Rugby club nor the Spanish Federation “had the slightest knowledge of the facts, nor did they expressly or implicitly consent to them”.
The purpose of altering the photocopy of the player’s passport would have been to stop him from occupying a place as a foreigner, which gave the team a competitive advantage in national competitions. But it ended up affecting the team when the striker played, already as an assimilated Spaniard, the final minutes of two games with the Lions after that the Federation would accept the manipulated photocopy as good despite knowing that it could not compare it with the original document.
The three people, who acknowledged in writing their responsibility to try to ensure that the selection was not punished, have been sanctioned by the sports route and now face a complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office. In the ordinary sphere, they therefore still enjoy the presumption of innocence. The Public Ministry has also included the former president of Alcobendas Rugby in its complaint, although the club maintains that the mention of the latter responds to “an error”.
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