Only in the stretch between 2016 and 2018, FC Barcelona paid a total of 1.4 million euros to DASNIL 95 SL, a company owned by José María Enríquez Negreira, former First Division referee and vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) between 1994 and 2018. This amount, now investigated by the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office, accounted for 95% of the total income received by the company in that period, which makes clear its instrumental nature. The existence of DASNIL 95, as shown by the annual accounts to which La Vanguardia has had access, was due solely and exclusively to its relationship with the Barça club.
The investigations by the Prosecutor’s Office into possible tax irregularities, as SER Catalunya uncovered, focused solely on those three years, between 2016 and 2018, but the amounts could reach 7 million euros, according to the newspaper El País, through over more than 20 years.
Negreira created DASNIL 95 SL in 1995, just one year after becoming Vice President of the Spanish Referees. According to Barcelona sources, there, when Josep Lluis Núñez was still president, he was able to begin his relationship with the club, which in exchange received technical reports related to professional arbitration. During the first years these reports were verbal by Enríquez Negreira himself, and from 2002, when his children Javier Enríquez Romero and Maria Luis Enriquez Romero became part of the company, the reports began to be made in text format. and video. They would be the only two employees for years in a company that came to invoice more than half a million euros annually.
Specifically, in the period investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office (2016-18) Barça paid DASNIL 95 SL 1,392,680 euros, while the company billed 1,459,349 euros, which means that 95.4% of the income came through the Barcelona entity. If analyzed year by year, Barça’s payments coincide almost to the millimeter with what is invoiced by the company.
In 2016 the payment was 532,728.02 euros and the turnover of 567,136 euros, in 2017 Barça contributed 541,752 and the volume of business dropped to 562,840. Finally, in 2018 the payment was 318,200 for half a season and the company invoiced 329,373 euros. As of June 2018, coinciding with the departure of Enríquez Negreira from the Committee after the defeat of Ángel María Villar as president of the Federation a year earlier, Barça stopped paying. The former referee went so far as to threaten Josep María Bartomeu by telephone with making public alleged “irregularities” in the case of not continuing with the payments. With the same intentions, he also sent a burofax to the club, according to what the newspaper El Mundo revealed yesterday. In 2019, DASNIL 95 would barely enter 7,384 euros. In 2020 it did not issue a single invoice.
The investigation tries to determine the motivation of these payments and if a tax offense can be concluded for not having correctly taxed those amounts. But an alleged crime of corruption between individuals is also being investigated, which punishes the payment of illegal commissions with sentences of six months to four years in prison for executives of sports entities.
According to the specialized portal Iusport, these alleged crimes would not prescribe in the criminal sphere until June 2023, although at the sports level they would have done so since more than three years had passed. This is so since for crimes with a sentence of less than 5 years, the crime itself prescribes after 5 years. Barça made the last payment in June 2018, for which it would prescribe in June of this 2023. In addition, after the reform of the Penal Code of 2010, as the Committee belonged to the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) and the directors of Barcelona to the club, both entities could be criminally responsible.
