Barça will not get rid of the Negreira case. The Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office will file a complaint against the club for a crime of corruption in sport, according to the newspaper El País and judicial sources have confirmed to La Vanguardia. The Public Ministry has finished the investigation that began a year ago for an alleged tax offense committed by the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) José María Enríquez Negreira and that has revealed that he received seven million euros from the club during the last thirty years for alleged verbal advice.
The complaint will be presented shortly in the courts of Barcelona and will be directed against the former president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, members of his management team, such as the former general manager Óscar Grau, and against the club as a legal entity. Despite the fact that the link with Negreira began with the board of directors of Josep Lluís Núñez, it will only be Bartomeu who faces possible criminal responsibilities since for the previous directors the crime would be prescribed. The complaint is in the hands of the State Attorney General’s Office, which is outlining some fringes, according to the same sources.
The Prosecutor’s Office appreciates an alleged crime of corruption in sport that would be equivalent to corruption between individuals and another administration. The first crime punishes the payment of illegal commissions with sentences of six months to four years in prison for directors of sports entities in addition to economic sanctions. In the event that it is shown that the payments served to influence arbitration decisions, this behavior would fit into a specific section of this crime: corruption between individuals in professional sports, a criminal offense designed to end match-fixing. Another of the crimes that will be charged will be that of unfair administration for the alleged illegitimate use of the partners’ money.
It remains to be seen if the matter lies with the Barcelona trial court 1, headed by magistrate Joaquín Aguirre, who received the complaint from the VAR referee, Xavier Estrada Fernández. The complaint presented alone by this still active arbitrator, and which earned him harsh reprimands from the rest of the arbitral group, has not yet been admitted for processing but forced the investigation of the Prosecutor’s Office to be paralyzed since the case was now being prosecuted.
The investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office began in May 2022 due to alleged irregularities by the Negreira company but was closed precipitously a few weeks ago after the active arbitrator, Xavier Estrada Fernández, filed a complaint in court, a maneuver that paralyzed the investigations. of the Prosecutor’s Office The investigation began after the Tax Agency informed that it had detected irregularities in the taxation of the DASNIL 95 company, owned by the former arbitrator. The company was dedicated to analyzing the behavior of the referees on the field of play and delivered a report to the sports area of ??FC Barcelona.
Between 2016 and 2018 the payments amounted to 1.4 million euros but the links with this company began at least since 2001, although previous payments have also been revealed, during the presidency of Josep Lluís Núñez. The Treasury asked for more specifics about the work provided and summoned Negreira to declare himself responsible for the company. He assured that there was no “supporting documentation” of the invoices since the advice was verbal. Faced with this strange response, the prosecutor referred the case to the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office.
As a result of the ‘Negreira case’, the League asked the judge of the National Court instructing the ‘Soule case’, on the alleged irregularities in the management of Ángel María Villar as president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), which investigate a series of payments of about 4,400 euros that the RFEF made between 2011 and 2016 to the son of the former vice president of the CTA José María Enríquez Negreira during the Villar stage.