The judicial summary of the Negreira case highlights two issues: that the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Arbitrators (CTA) did not pay the arbitrators, beyond gifts of little value with which he tried to compliment or look good (such as sandwiches and beach shovels), and that the money he collected was not only for him and could end up in third parties.
José María Enríquez Negreira was the vice-president of the CTA for 25 years but lived more at FC Barcelona. He received 7.3 million euros from the Barcelona club over 17 years in exchange for the alleged mission of guaranteeing the neutrality of the arbitration and not harming the club. He collected a third of the money in bearer checks that his collaborators withdrew every three days. This is stated in the judicial summary to which La Vanguardia has accessed. Those in charge of making the reinstatements effective were Concepción, Negreira’s secretary, and José Martínez, a personal friend of the former referee. José Martínez assured the National Police that he was only acting as a “messenger”. “They told me: ‘Go and cash this check.’ The amounts never exceeded 3,000 euros. It could be every day or every three days during this period. I paid them on behalf of the company, I had nothing to do with it. The money was not for me”, he revealed. Between 2016 and 2019, Negreira withdrew 550,000 euros in cash and spent 130,000 on his credit card. “Normally (the checks) were cashed by Concepción or José Martínez and they gave the cash to me. José was a personal friend who did the job for me so that I wouldn’t have to do it myself. I kept the money”, Negreira explained to the Treasury. According to the tax office, the number two of the referees had “a high standard of living” with “restaurants, trips and hotels” which does not correspond to the little wealth he currently accumulates, which makes them think that the money was going to to third parties who have not yet been identified. The Civil Guard, by order of the judge, will try to identify them. When he stopped receiving money from Barça, coinciding with his resignation from the Referee Committee, his level of expenditure dropped, his company closed and he fired his secretary.
However, there was a person linked to the club, Josep Contreras, who tried to keep the relationship with the Negreiras, father and son, going. Contreras, a member of a Barça commission, acted as an intermediary between the club and Negreira’s son. Vice-president of the Catalan Federation and close friend of the former president of the Federation, Ángel María Villar, hired Javier Enríquez in 2016 to be in charge of making videos of the referees. Barça did not hire him directly but instead invoiced Contreras’ company, which at the same time invoiced Barça with a 33% increase in the price due to the brokerage. They justified this way of proceeding to avoid associating the Negreira surname with the club, a strange maneuver because his father had been paid by the club for almost two decades. Contreras, who died in December last year, was being investigated in the Soule case for an alleged embezzlement of funds from the Catalan Federation. The tax authorities suspect that he was able to use three of his companies to divert funds from Barça through false or inflated invoices.
Negreira’s son acknowledged, in the police statement, that he delivered the videos and reports by hand to Contreras in cafes where he was meeting him. In Gavà, where Contreras lived, or in several hotels. “We stayed early in the morning two or three days in advance,” he said. ” Contreras never used WhatsApp or email. The contacts were made by telephone”. For those jobs in which he invested between 10 and 20 hours a month, he received 6,000 or 7,000 euros each month. The payments came from Contreras’ company, although sometimes he paid directly from the manager’s personal account.
