A businessman has filed a complaint before the Supreme Court against the deputies of Congress, Gerardo Pisarello and Eloi Badía and the former president of the parliamentary group of Unidas Podemos, Jaume Asens, for the crimes of coercion, extortion, falsehood, fraud, prevarication, bribery and illegal financing of political parties.
In accordance with the provisions of the claimed Law 2/2023, which protects people who report acts of political corruption, the businessman and founder of the defunct Open Camp sports theme park and current director of Gaudi Innovation, Francisco Medina, has filed the complaint before the Criminal Chamber of the High Court. For the complainant, the former deputy mayors of Barcelona City Council, Gerardo Pisarello and Jaume Asens, as well as the Councilor for the Presidency, Eloi Badia, “instrumentalized” the municipal company BSM and the Municipal Sports Commissioner and drew up “a plan ” to “stop the activity” and “prevent the commercial viability” of the Open Camp theme park.
The businessman explains that he launched the first theme park in the world dedicated to the universe of sport, located in the Olympic Ring of Barcelona, ??between June 2016 and July 2017. “With the shared will to make the first theme park in the world dedicated to be located in Barcelona, ??on June 25, 2014, the municipal company BSM concluded with the entrepreneur Open Camp the necessary rental contract for the transfer of the use and management of the Olympic Stadium and the Esplanade of the Olympic Ring, for a period of 230 days a year for 5 years,” the complaint states.
Within this framework, the companies BSM and Open Camp jointly promoted a shared commercial development “based on being able to charge an entrance fee to access and enjoy the Olympic facilities repositioned as the first theme park in the world dedicated to sport” thanks to the initial investment of 7.6 million euros made by the Medina company. However, according to the businessman, as a consequence of the municipal elections of May 24, 2015, the government of Barcelona City Council radically changed its political course and was made up of the councilors of the organization Barcelona En Común Podem and that ended up leading to ruin to the project.
The former founder of Open Camp maintains that the defendants “promoted and ordered the commission of a premeditated battery of intimidating, fraudulent and illicit acts aimed at altering and subverting the operation and commercial viability” of the theme park with the intention of putting an end to it. evading the consequent financial compensation derived from the serious damages and losses that they knew would be caused to dozens of promoter and supplier companies as well as to the hundreds of evicted workers.
On the other hand, the complainant states that, “abusing their status as public authorities, the new municipal political leaders forced the Open Camp company to implement a series of arbitrary functional and commercial demands under penalty of stopping the park by denying the necessary authorizations and municipal permits necessary to be able to produce and open the theme park in a timely manner” and that, in addition, conditioned “the essential institutional collaboration to compliance and assumption of the abusive and arbitrary extractive impositions demanded”. As a supposed result of this political activity, there was “the total and absolute collapse of the concerted business model” until the bankruptcy of the business.
For its part, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has informed the prosecutor before admitting or rejecting this complaint for processing. According to legal sources informing EL MUNDO, the Public Ministry has taken a position in favor of rejecting it.
