The Prosecutor’s Office summons Joan Laporta and Joan Gaspart and eight other people as witnesses for the Negreira case. The Public Ministry includes the current president and the former president in the list of witnesses who must appear in court to explain the payments made to José María Enríquez Negreira between 2001 and 2010. According to what La Vanguardia has learned, the prosecution asks to subpoena to ten witnesses to shed light on the payments to the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees. In the case of Laporta and Gaspart, although they paid Negreira, they are not charged in the case. On the one hand, because the crime of unfair administration is prescribed and, on the other, because corruption between individuals did not exist in the Penal Code until 2010. As they must appear as witnesses, they will be obliged to tell the truth. In its complaint, the Prosecutor’s Office accused Barça of having paid Enríquez Negreira for years to be favored by arbitration.
The former Barça coaches, Luís Enrique and Ernesto Valverde, also appear on the list, as reported by the newspaper El País. The objective is to clarify if they saw the videos that Negreira’s company supposedly made and then that of his son analyzing the profile of the referees. Valverde, in a recent press conference, did not deny that the videos existed, but he specified that he never looked at them and “did not even know they existed.” The concept that appeared in all the invoices that the Negreiras turned against Barça for a value of 40,000 to 50,000 euros per month was “Technical video advice”. In World Cup or Eurocup years, the amount amounted to 90,000 or 100,000 euros for recording matches and viewing matches of the Spanish National Team and other National Teams. In total, the Negreiras received 7.3 million euros from Barça over 17 years.
The Prosecutor’s list also includes Carles Tusquets, who was the president of the Management Board that took control of the club after the resignation of Bartomeu and his board. However, the prosecutor summons him to testify because of his status as ex-treasurer of the club and former president of the economic commission. The objective is that she can clarify the reason for the payments to Negreira. Several sources have explained to La Vanguardia that the payments to the former referee escaped the club’s control mechanisms and that they were masked with the payroll of players and other managers of the sports department. Payments were validated by those responsible for the sports part. In addition, since the hiring of the Negreiras was inherited at least since Gaspart’s time, it never had to be approved by the Board of Directors.
The list also includes Pep Segura, who was the club’s general manager since 2017 and technical secretary since 2015. Both the videos and Negreira’s invoices must have passed through his hands to validate the payments. In addition, the Prosecutor’s Office also requests the appearance of Pere Lluís Mellado, current director of the legal area of ??FC Barcelona. He also held the position from 2004 to 2010. He was also CEO of Reus when the club was managed by Joan Oliver.
Negreria’s son, Javier Enríquez Romero, must also appear as a witness. His inclusion on this list is surprising since his company began to be a supplier to FC Barcelona in 2016, replacing his father’s. The payments he received were made through a company belonging to the former Barça director, Josep Contreras, who died in December.
The State Attorney General’s Office has issued a decree transferring the investigation into the Negreira case to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Until now it was done by the investigative proceedings service of the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office. The derivation of the investigation is due, according to a statement from the Public Ministry, to the fact that “the facts denounced could constitute a continuous crime of corruption in business in the sports field, unfair administration and document falsification.
