FC Barcelona responded to the Tax Agency that “it cannot be affirmed who, by FCB, was responsible for commissioning the services” to the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), José María Enríquez Negreira, as published this Saturday The country.
This is stated in one of the documents of the judicial investigation into the payments of 7.3 million euros between 2001 and 2018 made by the club to companies belonging to the former director of the CTA, to whose content the aforementioned newspaper has had access.
According to him, Barcelona assured when requested by the Tax Agency and by the Prosecutor’s Office that “the contract with said company (Dasnil) was not formalized in writing.” “The club does not know the details of the formalization of the verbal contract since we should go back to 2001. That is, the people who had to negotiate said contracts are no longer employees of the club,” the Barça entity responded in writing.
The Tax Agency began an inspection of Barcelona in July 2019 for Corporate Tax for the years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and Value Added Tax for 2015, 2016 and 2017, for payments made in relation to invoices issued by companies linked to Enríquez Negreira.
The former CTA vice president told the Treasury that there was never a contract with Barcelona, ??but rather a verbal agreement between him and successive club presidents, and he denied having used the money to pay referees, according to the newspaper.
“My obligation was to give my opinion about the matches in terms of refereeing and the players. Technical advice. What FC Barcelona wanted was to make sure that no decisions were made against the club, that everything was neutral”, he stated. The Tax Agency transferred its suspicions about the case to the Prosecutor’s Office, which in May 2022 began an investigation in which it required documentation from Barcelona.
The club sent a copy of the invoices and proof of payment, but insisted that it did not have more information and, as the period investigated initially included the years 2016 to 2018, it sent two people who were part of Josep Maria Bartomeu’s circle of trust. (2014-2020): the former CEO Òscar Grau and the former sports manager Albert Soler, who testified as witnesses, according to El País.
On the 15th, Barcelona’s Examining Court number 1 admitted for processing a complaint against FC Barcelona, ??its former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep María Bartomeu, and Enríquez Negreira, Óscar Grau and Albert Soler, for a continuous crime of corruption in the field sports, in addition to the appearance of LaLiga and the complaint filed by the referee Xavier Estrada Fernández.
According to the complaint from the prosecutor’s office collected by the court, the Barcelona entity, through presidents Rosell and Bartomeu, “reached and maintained a strictly confidential agreement with José María Enríquez Negreira, so that, in his capacity as vice president of the CTA and in exchange for money, carry out actions tending to favor FC Barcelona in the decision-making of the referees in the matches that the club played”.
For all of them, the judge sees indications of the existence of a continuing crime of corruption between individuals in the sports field, a continuing crime of unfair administration and a continuing crime of falsifying a commercial document that must be investigated.
