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Soccer often works as a screen or as a shortcut. In this advanced phase of capitalism, which is virtual and abstract capitalism, what is linked or what surrounds the ball is usually the way to demonstrate the unprovable, and to add a false social and cultural commitment to it. Wash his face. The fall of Generación Zoe is, perhaps, the most complete proof of that formula: the complaints and the judicial investigation for the alleged crimes of illicit association and fraud also affect soccer, where its CEO, Leonardo Cositorto, created clubs and harangued teams with promises of prizes, money and promotion (social, sports and economic).
“We are fed up with the balls,” Rubén Guillén, general coordinator of the Zoe Athletic Club, from Villa María, the Cordovan city where the company built its financial and multisector architecture, and where the investigation of the Prosecutor’s Office is also focused, tells PROFILE , by Juliana Companys, who issued a dozen arrest warrants.
Two of those arrest warrants are for Claudio Álvarez and his mother, Silvia Fermani, president and secretary of the Zoe Athletic Club, one of the faces of this business group in the sports arena, created four months ago in Villa María and which has Guillén as coordinator and former soccer players Diego and Gustavo Graieb as technical directors of all divisions.
“We are not down yet. All the people who have committed have been paid. The club was going down a different lane from the company. I can not speak of scam because so far they paid everything. The only scam is if there is no continuity of work”, says Guillén.
“Everything always sounded very strange,” says Diego Conrero, president of the Villa María League, when asked regarding the “revolution” that the Zoe Atletic Club would generate according to what was published by different media in the country.
The strange thing is that this club, which is regarding to collapse due to the fall of the company that supported it, paid “per diems” up to five times more than what its competitors in the area pay. And while some technicians direct the club of their town out of a sense of belonging or love, Zoe Atletic paid 150 thousand pesos a month to the sports managers of the project.
Until the beginning of January, everyone was paid. Even the legal documentation that the League requested was fulfilled to the letter. But since mid-January, the complaints and the visibility acquired by the alleged pyramid scheme of the holding company caused all payments to be stopped.
The calls to Claudio Álvarez and Fermani, from Cositorto’s circle of trust, always have the same outcome: their phones are switched off. Something similar happens at the other end of the country with Deportivo Zoe, the club that participates in the Regional Tournament and that gave a blow with some paid notes in sports media and taking Miguel Ángel Brindisi and Alejandro Mancuso as managers.
Just as he deceived thousands of savers with promises of succulent profits in record time, the clubs that Zoe created and managed also promised an idyllic future: going from not having a club to playing abroad was the recurring catchphrase of coach Carlos Avedissian, a nationalized Uruguayan Costa Rican.
Zoe also reached closer and more massive clubs such as Atlas and Deportivo Español, where she arrived as a kind of management, with Ricardo Caruso Lombardi as frontman, wearing a jacket with the Lion of Zoe logo included. The strongest bet, however, was on Chacarita, with whom he signed a contract for all of 2022 to become his main sponsor: according to what the funeral club reported in recent hours, Zoe paid in January for the first quarter six million three hundred thousand pesos. What will happen following April? Everyone in the club imagines it, but nobody wants to get ahead of it.