The referee Xavier Estrada Fernández has sued the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) José María Enríquez Negreira for alleged sports corruption or sports fraud in payments for advising FC Barcelona.
The complaint has been filed in the Barcelona courts this Friday and states that Negreira provided arbitration advisory and follow-up services “with the aim of guaranteeing arbitration favorable to the interests of FC Barcelona” while he was vice president of the Arbitration Committee, in different seasons since 2003 to 2018.
The document details that the arbitrator invoiced these works through his company DASNIL 95 SL and adds that between 2016 and 2018 he invoiced and received 1,392,680 euros from Barça.
Estrada’s complaint is also directed against Negreira’s son, Javier Enríquez Romero, who was the manager of the company and who “provided ‘coaching’ services to active referees, while accompanying them from the hotel to the stadium where they had to arbitrate”, and asks to investigate the case in defense of the honor of the members.
Estrada has worked as a soccer referee in the first division and, since the end of the 2020-2021 season, he has not worked as a field referee but as VAR. For its part, the Prosecutor’s Office maintains an investigation for an alleged crime of corruption between individuals.
After learning about the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office, the club said in a statement that “in the past it hired the services of an external technical consultant, who supplied, in video format, technical reports referring to lower-category players in Spain for the technical secretariat. ” of the club.
FC Barcelona added that the relationship with this external provider “was extended with technical reports related to professional arbitration in order to complement the information required by the coaching staff of the first team and the subsidiary”, something that it underlines as usual in football clubs. professionals.
He added that these outsourced services currently fall to a worker assigned to the soccer area and regretted that “this information appears precisely at the best sporting moment of this season.”