New revelation in the Emiliano Sala case: Cardiff City tried to take out insurance after his disappearance

Four years after the death of Emiliano Sala, a new revelation on the case exposes a millionaire conflict between Cardiff City and an insurance company. According to court records, the club sought to take out insurance for the attacker just hours after the plane carrying him from France went missing.

Cardiff City, owned by Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan, had just announced the signing of Sala. The 28-year-old Argentinian player had just made his name at Nantes in France. The pass – for 17 million euros, the most expensive of the entity – meant his leap to the Premier League. That same January 19, 2019, however, the flight that was taking him to Wales from Nantes disappeared, where he had gone above all to greet his colleagues.

This Thursday, the BBC aired that Cardiff City tried to take out insurance for £20 million (23 million euros) the day after the plane crash.

Documents provided at the trial evaluated by the High Court indicate that the club has contacted the company Miller insurance via email to try and get insurance the morning after the plane went missing in the English Channel.

Now, the Welsh institution -owned by Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan- claims £10m in court (11.5 million euros). The club, meanwhile, say Cardiff were “fully aware” that the player was uninsured.

Cardiff’s representatives said the firm failed to warn them of the risk of “delayed notification of interest” or of “measures which could be taken to reduce or eliminate such risks”.

Miller Insurance, on the other hand, claims that it has already warned that there was a window between a player’s signing and his inclusion on the insurance payroll. For this reason, the company assures, it was not their job to “prosecute” the club managers to add new players to their coverage “immediately”.

The confession of the pilot who carried Emiliano Sala

A few moments before embarking on the journey to Cardiff, the pilot of the plane that brought Sala made a strong confession: he said that during the outward journey to France the car had presented some technical problems.

“I’m in the middle of the (English) Channel and ‘bang,'” David Ibbotson acknowledged to his friend Kevin Jones in a telephone conversation.

“I’m flying and then ‘boom’. I was like, ‘what’s up?’ So I went ahead and checked my parameters, everything was fine and it was still flying, but it got my attention,” he added of the strange behavior of the small Piper PA-46 Malibu aircraft.

“That Malibu, it gets like a fog every now and then. You can hear it, very, very low all over the fuselage,” continued the conversation, accidentally recorded and posted on a BBC podcast.

Sala’s body was found 17 days after the plane went missing. Ibbotson, on the other hand, has never been found. The footballer’s body was 67 meters deep when it was rescued by the British agency that investigates plane crashes.

The forensic report indicated that the death was caused by “wounds to the head and body” as a result of the plane’s impact with the turbulent waters of the English Channel. The British justice ruled that, before his death, Sala was “deeply unconscious” after having suffered poisoning due to the inhalation of toxic gases.

During the flight, the Santa Fe man – who has never played professionally in Argentina – sent a text to a friend, in which he discussed his fear of heights.

“Bro, I’m dead. I’m here, above the plane, which seems to be about to collapse and I’m going to Cardiff, crazy, tomorrow afternoon we will start training with the new team, let’s go see what happens,” I inform you.

“If they don’t hear from me in an hour and a half, I don’t know if they will send someone to look for me, because they won’t find me, but you know… Dad, how scared I am,” added Sala.

After her death, David Henderson, the businessman who arranged the flight, was found guilty of endangering the safety of the plane and received an 18-month prison sentence.

With information from EFE

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