Barça & Benedito fail to reach agreement on vote of no confidence dates
It's still not clear when the signatures need to be collected by
The club were open to accepting one disagreement but not the other
Delegates from the Barcelona board -- Josep Cardoner (vice president), Gómez Ponti (legal) y Oscar Grau (CEO) -- met with Agusti Benedito and two members of his team with the idea of reaching an agreement on the date the window closes for socios to sign the vote of no confidence.
The statutes indicate that Benedito has 14 days to get 15 percent of socios to sign the vote of no confidence from when he received the ballot papers. The club argue that this is from the day they make the papers available to Benedito (which they did immediately on Friday when he requested them) and Benedito says it's from the day he collects them. Barça agreed to go with Benedito's understanding of the rules, meaning the deadline would be Sept. 26 and not Sept. 19.
However, they could not come to an agreement on the second problem, regarding whether Saturday is a working day or not. Barcelona say that it is and should be counted as so in the vote of no confidence. Benedito doesn't share that point of view and there was no agreement. Benedito suggested that the decision, therefore, should be made by an independent panel of lawyers in Barcelona and the club agreed that third-party input is required. However, they feel the final say should be made by socio Joan Maria Trayter, who is a professor in administrative law.
The meeting ended without any agreement, then. The lack of agreement on the second point invalidating the first agreement. Barcelona believe the deadline is Sept. 18, Benedito thinks it's Oct. 2.
