Barcelona deny the allegations of rule-breaking by Laporta in Camp Nou development
Joan Laporta has supposedly broken club rules in Espai Barca tender process but Barcelona are denying the allegations
Barcelona has officially denied the rumors that suggest Joan Laporta broke club rules in Camp Nou development project.
The project, which is called ‘Espai Barca’, was first greenlit in 2014, proposing a remodeling of Camp Nou and its surrounding areas. An additional referendum took place in early 2021 which took the project’s budget to €1.5billion.
Espai Barca will see the capacity of the Camp Nou increase by 6000 seats, reaching 105,000 capacity with a retractable roof added on top of that.
A Turkish company by the name of Limak was announced to be in charge of the project but EL Confidencial has since come out and claimed that the company should’ve been excluded. El Confidencial reports that Limak should be ineligible to bid for the contract since it hasn’t provided proof that they’ve built a stadium with more than 40,000 capacity in the past ten years and they haven’t provided two references of buildings constructed in the Spain with value greater than €150m in the past decade.
has since come out and released a lengthy statement, which reads:
"Barcelona wants to refute the story published today, Monday, January 23, 2023 in El Confidencial titled: 'Laporta broke the Barca rules to award the Camp Nou work to the Turkish company Limak'."
"The bid specifications for the restructuring work on Camp Nou were announced to all the companies that submitted bids and were effective date from September 1, 2022,"
the statement continued.
"The terms and conditions set forth therein established no requirement for bidding companies to have built a football stadium with more than 40,000 seats or two constructions in Spain.
"Prior to this bidding process, there was a process that commenced in 2017, and which was cancelled in December 2020 by means of an official communication on the Barcelona supplier portal to all participating companies at that time.
"It was not until September 2022 when the new bidding process began, the outcome of which was for the project to be awarded to LIMAK as the best rated company.
"There was no breach of the terms and conditions as these were associated to the new tender process, which is dated from September 1, 2022."
It added: "
As we have set out previously, the document [that El Confidencial claimed to have seen] referred to is for the pre-qualification that began in 2017, and in no way corresponds to the requisites in the conditions laid down on September 1, 2022.
"The process of obtaining a building licence from Barcelona City Council is totally independent of the adjudication process for the company to carry out the construction.
"In no way is the building license at risk because the name on the license is that of Barcelona as the initiator of the construction, not the construction company."
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