The former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), José María Enríquez Negreira, went this Tuesday to the Institute of Legal Medicine of Catalonia to be examined by a forensic expert who must certify whether he suffers from symptoms of dementia, as his defense has alleged before the judge.
As reported by legal sources, the medical examination, which is being carried out this morning, has been carried out by order of the head of the investigating court number 1 of Barcelona, ??Joaquín Aguirre, who is investigating the fate of the nearly seven million euros that FC Barcelona paid Enríquez Negreira and his son between 2001 and 2018.
Negreira arrived walking at the Institute of Legal Medicine of Catalonia around 9.30 am with his wife and his lawyer and at one point he tripped and fell to the ground, although he was able to get up with the support of his companions. and has continued his march to the building where the tests will be performed.
The objective of the test is to verify whether the investigated person, 78 years old, suffers from a cognitive impairment that makes him unable to face a criminal trial, an argument that his defense argued before the Prosecutor’s Office when the public prosecutor’s office was still investigating the case, which led to in a complaint to the court.
To this end, Negreira’s defense used a report from the Alzheimer Center of Barcelona – one of the reference centers in the treatment of this degenerative disease – which certifies that the former referee suffers from “mild dementia”, with alterations in memory or language, but it remains partially oriented “in time, space and person.”
Once the Prosecutor’s complaint was already in the hands of the court, Daniel Pérez-Esqué, Negreira’s lawyer, presented another document before the investigating magistrate in which he reiterated the former student’s incapacity situation, referring to the Alzheimer Center report.
With the examination commissioned from the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Catalonia (IMLCFC), the investigating judge intends not only to confirm the dementia that Negreira claims to suffer, but also to determine if he will be in a position to be interrogated as an investigator and, in the future, respond to a possible lawsuit.
In fact, the magistrate has yet to summon Negreira and the former Barça directors to testify, whom the Prosecutor’s Office denounced for the payments to the former referee and his son, which the club justified by saying that they corresponded to reports on arbitrations.
In parallel, the Civil Guard is analyzing the documentation intervened in the search ordered by the judge of the offices of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) located in the offices of the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) in Las Rozas (Madrid), as well as like the one that FC Barcelona has provided on the case, at the request of the court.
At the end of last month, the instructor issued an order in which he agreed to charge those accused in the Negreira case with a crime of bribery, which is added to those of corruption between individuals in the sports field, unfair administration, falsification of a commercial document and money laundering that until now was attributed to them.
The judge suspects that the payments to the former referee and his son could have been due to a “novel form of possible illegitimate remuneration to soccer referees”, in a context of “possible systemic corruption within the CTA” at the time when Negreira was vice president of this organization.
