Barcelona president Joan Laporta spoke of 'astronomic commissions paid without justification,' on Tuesday when he explained why the club have asked the public prosecutor in Spain to investigate previous president Josep Bartomeu and his board.
Laporta said: 'The prosecutor should decide if this is negligence or fraud' as he detailed the activity of the last regime as revealed by a recently concluded internal investigation as to why the club have debts of €1.17bn (£977m) and losses last year of €480m (£401m).
Laporta denounced his predecessor for making 'payments with false justification or with no justification or that had a disproportionate cost to the club' and he said that commissions to third parties were paid at 33 per cent instead of the 'normal' five per cent.
Laporta said that his regime had so far reduced the wage bill it inherited by €159m (£133m) but he added: 'There is still a lot to do; we know that by looking at the market.
'There are clubs interested in our players but when they see the salary that they are on they take a step back. We are still paying above the level of our competitors.'
In among his discourse were suggestions of more serious foul play including the possibility that companies had been created 'just so they could invoice Barcelona' or that silence of third parties had been 'bought'.
Insisting that the club was not making any specific accusations and that the matter was now in the hands of the prosecution he said: 'We decided to denounce these acts and put them in the hands of the prosecutor because we are not judges or the police and we cannot be spending the club's resources on lawsuits that we have no guarantee of winning. There is a complexity to the facts.'
And again he dropped in another seemingly huge possible misdemeanor adding: 'There is an astronomical commission to a lawyer that is paid via a player.
'We think the Prosecutor is better placed to investigate all this.'
Bartomeu wrote an open letter to Laporta back in August in which he looked to absolve himself for the mounting level of debt.
He believes his board would have straightened out the financial problems and said deals were in place to raise lots of money - only the new board have not taken those deals up.
'From April 2020 we began the Barcelona Corporate project, consisting, in summary, of the entry of four strategic partners...' Bartomeu said in part of his letter.
'If [Laporta's] Board had approved the [Barcelona Corporate] project, it would have meant a capital injection of at least 220 million euros with the aim of reducing the income losses caused by COVID...which in 2020-21 could be 375 million.
'If to those 220 million euros we had added the necessary 20 percent salary reduction (90 million euros) from the players' contracts, essential from March 21, 2021, when the worst expectations were confirmed, the salary ratio dictated by LaLiga would have been complied with, allowing for players to be registered.'
Back to Tuesday's press conference and Laporta continued: 'I have never said that they [previous board] made themselves rich without justification but that the forensic [the internal report] does not discount conduct that would have unjustifiably enriched those who ordered these payments.'
Laporta said the internal review he ordered had detected a 'modus operandi' of bypassing the club's in-built spending controls.
He added: 'They should have known that the wage bill was spiraling out of control and that it was going to be very difficult to compete.'