The president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, will explain in a press conference this Monday the club’s version of the investigation for alleged corruption in club payments to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira.
Laporta will appear at the Camp Nou, one month after the Barcelona Examining Court 1 admitted for processing the complaint of the Prosecutor’s Office and the complaint of the arbitrator Xavier Estrada Fernández, which originated the legal case.
The judge has opened it for the alleged ongoing crimes of corruption between individuals in the sports fieldunfair administration and false commercial documents, and are investigated, in addition to Negreira, FC Barcelona as a legal entity and its former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu.
It is also investigated as legal person the company of Negreira DASNIL 95 SL and the ex-Blaugrana directors Óscar Grau and Albert Soler.
The complaint that originated the case maintains that, Between 2016 and 2018, Negreira received 1,392,680 euros from FC Barcelona through his company Dasnil 95 SL.
For its part, the Prosecutor’s Office suspects that from 2001 to 2018 Negreira charged from barca more than 7.3 million euros through its companies, in exchange for “actions tending to favor the FCB in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club, and thus in the results of the competitions”.
To investigate it, the judge has commissioned the Civil Guard determine the reason for Barça’s payments and the destination of those payments.
“verbal agreement”
The Prosecutor’s Office believes that, through Rosell and Bartomeu as presidents, Barça “maintained a strictly confidential verbal agreement” with Negreira, who was then vice-president of the Arbitration Committee, so that he favored them in arbitration decisions.
Negreira was relieved of the CTA in May 2018 and then Barça stopped paying him, which Negreira reproached Bartomeu in a burofax that the prosecutor reproduced like this in the complaint: “I do not have the will to publicize all the irregularities that I have known and experienced first-hand in relation to anyone from the club, but you will force me to do so if you do not reconsider your decision and comply with the agreement we had to continue counting on my services until the end of the presidential term”.