In a hurried effort to ease family tensions, Juan Rubiales, the uncle of the president and former chief of staff of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), brought a case before Justice on July 1, 2022. He claimed that his dismissal had been unfair. The Social Court No. 3 in Madrid received the filing, which argued that the actions used to betray Luis Rubiales were well documented. The court’s ruling, issued in June, addresses these claims in detail.
Messages with Sergio Ramos
The decision establishes that Juan Rubiales accessed RFEF information via his corporate email account. He reportedly sent at least twenty emails between February and May 2022 to two addresses, one belonging to him and another tied to an external recipient. There is also a message to a separate address, possibly connected to another business contact, suggesting attempts to cross-check emails with his nephew and their manager. Andreu Camps and Tomás González Cueto are referenced in this context.
The judge notes that Juan Rubiales exchanged messages through WhatsApp with RFEF managers, including Sergio Ramos, and that the communications touched on credit card authorizations, the formation of the ethics committee, and the content of various meetings, all of which are documented in the sentence.
The internal RFEF investigation identified a list of twenty emails, including several internal messages from RFEF personnel, a photo of the RFEF president with a non-RFEF associate, and a WhatsApp exchange mentioning the RFEF head, among other documents.
The voices of Rubiales
The dates when Juan Rubiales received information from the RFEF coincide with the release of what El Confidencial has described as the voices of Rubiales—private conversations involving the head of the RFEF with various figures.
The collection references Ramos himself and Gerard Piqué. One notable episode involved a decision to relocate the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia, a move that benefited Kosmos, the company linked to Barça’s former defender, and which included a commission funded by the Saudi regime.
Juan Rubiales’ compensation and the ethics dispute
The ruling ties a publication about the RFEF’s ethics commission in El Mundo to the disclosures about Rubiales’ communications. Four days after Juan Rubiales transmitted the contested information to the specified email address, new details emerged that shed light on broader ethics concerns.
The sentence also reveals that Juan Rubiales earned an annual gross salary of 125,000 euros during his time at the RFEF. It states that he received 6,394.73 euros as compensation for his dismissal while serving as director of the RFEF Museum, a position his nephew, Luis Rubiales, held before stepping down from the private secretary role on December 10, 2020, a post he had held since June 5, 2018.
Based on these findings, the judge concludes that Juan Rubiales’ conduct involved an implied breach of trust, breach of confidence, and breach of professional secrecy. These circumstances underpin the decision to dismiss the former chief of staff of the RFEF while he was on medical leave as of July 1, 2022. The court notes that the origin of the dismissal remains valid, and the dismissed party retains the right to appeal to the High Court of Justice.