Chelsea's president of business Tom Glick initially dismissed a complaint about inappropriate text messages sent by the club's commercial director to a female agent as "not relevant" to his job.
BBC Sport has learned that two weeks after the messages were first brought to the attention of Glick by agent Catalina Kim, he told her the issue was "not interesting" and he had "set it aside".
He said he had not looked in detail at the screenshots of the messages Kim had been sent by Damian Willoughby - just "the headlines".
Only when challenged on his response by Kim did he agree to review the messages again, and an internal review led to the sacking of Willoughby last week.