Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano is "embroiled in controversial allegations that he spied on his former colleagues at Barcelona in a plot to quash leaks that could destabilise" the Spanish club's former President and close ally Joan Laporta, according to James Ducker of the LONDON TIMES. Soriano and another former Barcelona exec are accused of overseeing "an order to monitor the internal e-mails of fellow staff at the club over a three-year period between 2005 and 2008." The allegations came to light yesterday and are thought to have come out of "a wider, recently concluded three-year fact-finding investigation by the public prosecutor’s office of Catalonia centring mainly on Laporta." Sources close to Soriano, who joined City last August, fear that he and former Barcelona Sporting Dir Txiki Begiristain, who joined Man City two months after his compatriot, "may be the subject of a smear campaign by figures in the present regime at the Nou Camp." Soriano and Begiristain left Barcelona when Laporta was succeeded as president by Sandro Rosell. It is suggested that when Soriano was VP at Barcelona he and former Manading Dir Joan Oliver used technology that allowed them "to monitor internal staff e-mails, including those of managers and directors" (LONDON TIMES, 2/20).
