The judge in the Negreira case, Joaquín Aguirre, suspects the existence of “systemic corruption” in the Technical Committee of Arbitrators (CTA) and wants to clarify whether Barça’s payments to the vice-president of the said Committee, José María Enríquez Negreira , they served to pervert the system of appointing referees to benefit the Barcelona club. The judge points this out, but raises it as a line of inquiry and not as a proven fact, in an interlocutory hearing in which he ratifies the legitimacy of Real Madrid to appear in the case as a private prosecution as an alleged injured party.
In the letter, the magistrate marks the line of investigation he wants to follow and suggests some hypotheses for which there is still no evidence. The magistrate points to the fact that “there are no indications that Barça had paid to buy “a specific match”, but demands that the Civil Guard investigate whether the process of appointing the referees for each match or the promotion or relegation was perverted by Negreira himself. In this way, it orders that it be investigated “if a referee qualification system supervised by Negreira was established within the CTA that could allow referees similar to him to officiate relevant LaLiga or Cup matches and international matches, or even and still maintain the category, so that the income would increase in a very important way”. If so, it would be a “possible illegitimate payment to football referees”, he remarks. “And, even if this last point is not proven”, says the judge, it must be studied if the annual payment to the former vice-president of the CTA “is in itself a crime, even if the payment by Negreira is not proven to specific referees to alter the result of certain matches”.
The magistrate takes as reference some news published by the media in which several arbitrators, some retired, have stated that the CTA used “a corrective index (which the media mockingly called corruptor) to determine the internal category of each arbitrator with the financial consequences that this entailed for the arbitrators. They say that the operation of the corrective index did not meet known criteria, but that the referees suspected that there was a discrepancy between the level of each referee and the classification in the CTA. For this reason, the judge asks the Civil Guard to also investigate this end.
According to the interlocutory agreement, between 2001 and 2018, Barça paid between 70,000 and 700,000 euros per year to Negreira, one of the three vice-presidents of the body that appoints the referees each day and decides on promotions and relegations and internationals, for the which in this case will have to be decided if this constitutes a crime, which crime and for what purpose the payments were made. In this sense, the magistrate points to another suspicion. “It is presumed by pure logic that FC Barcelona would not pay vice-president Negreira around 7 million euros since 2001 if it did not benefit him”.
