03/01/2021 17:00
Clarín.com
sports
Updated 03/01/2021 17:00
For some time now, FC Barcelona went from being the team that amazed the world to being a team
beaten, whipped and full of problems on and off the pitch
, which not even Lionel Messi has been able to rescue from the abyss.
The Argentine is one of the most responsible for having made a big club a giant one.
However,
he is not the only Albiceleste DNI
that is immersed in this crisis.
There is another, less known but directly related to what became "
Barçagate
", which ended up exploding on Monday morning in Argentina with the arrests of several leaders, led by former club president Josep María Bartomeu.
This is
Gastón Douek
, a partner in one of the companies that designed the attack on social networks against the players of the Blaugrana squad, with Messi
at the center of that target shot
.
Little more than a year passed since
Cadena SER
revealed that the Barcelona board of directors, with Bartomeu at the helm, had hired companies to, in theory, prop up the figure of the then head of the club, although in practical terms that meant also elaborating what known as
"armies of trolls"
, fake accounts on social networks that are dedicated to
defame people or institutions.
In this case, the companies I3 Ventures, Big Data Solutions, SG Social Science Ventures, Tantra Soft, Digital Side and Futuric had been targeted for being related to Facebook profiles that
systematically questioned
team players in general and Messi in particular.
According to those information, even the invoices generated by the contracting of these services
were destroyed
to avoid controls.
Messi and Bartomeu when signing the renewal of the Argentine's contract in 2014. AFP Photo / Miguel Ruiz
In April 2020,
six managers ended up resigning
, including Emili Rousaud, vice of the club and potential candidate to succeed Josep Bartomeu in the presidency.
At that time
, the Argentine track emerged
with three companies involved,
all based in Olivos
, and there was even an audit that investigated whether there was an overprice in the payment to service providers.
I3 Ventures
, the company that was most committed, was headed by the Uruguayan
Carlos Rafael Ibáñez Constantino
.
He derived part of the work for which he had been hired from the other companies, of which three were Argentine:
Tantra, Digital Side and Big Data Solutions
.
Each one received 198 thousand euros, which came
from six different boxes
because the budget ceiling for each department of the club was 200 thousand euros.
This is where the name of Douek comes from: it
was he who founded Tantra Soft SA
in 2009. In his resume he accumulates participation in more than twenty electoral campaigns.
In the world of politics he is known as
"the Lord of Trolls
.
"
He worked with Sergio Massa, Juan Schiaretti, Martín Lousteau, Gabriela Michetti and Omar Perotti, among others.
Last year the businessman told Clarín: “
I have nothing to do with this story
.
I was a partner of Ibáñez until we made an agreement and
I retired from the company
.
I have all the papers to prove it ”.
And he added: "Anyway, to say that these companies were hired to discredit Lionel Messi
is absurd
."
Last year, when it was known that Messi wanted to leave the club, the culé public took the side of the Argentine.
Photo EFE / Alejandro García
In 2019, in dialogue with La Nación, Douek, then owner of the company Prosumia and partner of the political operator Guillermo Seita, admitted that he
set up a network of accounts
to use in the 2012 electoral campaign in Mexico.
"
There was no bigger machinery of 'trolls' than in Mexico 2012
, and we assembled that machinery. To give you an idea: in a single day, Twitter downloaded 48,000 accounts to us.
We had 150,000 accounts,
" he said.
There he added: "If today I want to dirty someone, I
set up a bot farm
, I make them tweet in favor of that person and I denounce them later."
According to Douek, the trolling system had lost its effectiveness due to the controls implemented by Twitter.
Criticisms of Messi, in particular, were common, especially when it came time to negotiate a contract.
The "podium" of the most attacked was completed by Gerard Piqué and coach Pep Guardiola.
All that led to Bartomeu giving a press conference in which he
flatly denied
"that FC Barcelona has commissioned any service to" discredit people and institutions through social networks. "
However, on the Argentine morning of this Monday, Bartomeu was arrested together with the former director of the area of the presidency, Jaume Masferrer; the current general director of the club, Óscar Grau; and the head of the club's legal services, Roman Gómez Ponti, who are "isolated and isolated."