UEFA confirmed that its Appeals Committee has decided to admit Barcelona’s participation this season in its competitions and that the procedure related to its admission due to the Negreira case is suspended, although it may be resumed ex officio at the request of the Ethics and Disciplinary inspectors ( IED) case managers.
“FC Barcelona is provisionally admitted to participate in the 2023-2024 UEFA club competitions. A future decision on admission/exclusion from UEFA club competitions is reserved,” the body announced in a statement.
He also pointed out that Barcelona “is obliged to proactively keep inspectors informed of the progress of ongoing investigations and to provide all the documents and information they request.”
UEFA, which on March 23 announced the opening of an investigation against Barça for the Negreira case and the appointment of disciplinary inspectors to carry it out, “invites” them “to continue and finish their investigation and to send a new report to the UEFA Appeals Committee as long as they consider that the admission/exclusion of FC Barcelona should be evaluated”.
The report by inspectors Samuel Leuba and Mirjan Kollerm, according to the club, was in favor of Barcelona participating in the 2023-24 Champions League, as UEFA maintained this Thursday.
The opening of the investigation into Barcelona by UEFA came after learning of the one initiated by the Spanish justice system on the so-called Negreira case, due to a potential violation of its legal framework for payments made to José María Enríquez Negreira (7.3 million euros), who was vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees between 2001 and 2018.
UEFA appointed inspectors Leuba and Kollerm for this, who sent a questionnaire of about 70 questions to the club. Its president, Joan Laporta, met with the president of the European organization, Aleksander Ceferin, at the end of April in Slovenia to give him explanations in person about the case.
Previously, the Barça club had submitted a written report to UEFA in this regard.
The case originated from the investigation that the Tax Agency initiated against Barcelona, ??in July 2019, for the Corporate Tax of the years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, and the Value Added Tax (VAT) of 2015, 2016 and 2017, for the payments made in relation to the invoices drawn by the companies related to Enríquez Negreira.
The Tax Agency transferred its suspicions to the Prosecutor’s Office, which in May 2022 opened an investigation and on March 10 filed a complaint in the Barcelona Examining Court number 1 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 sports field.
The court admitted it for processing on March 15 and also the appearance of LaLiga and the complaint filed by the referee Xavier Estrada Fernández.
According to the complaint, the Barcelona entity, through the 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 – 7.3 million euros between 2001 and 2018- carry out actions tending to favor FC Barcelona in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club”.
UEFA already sanctioned the French club Olympique de Marseille with the exclusion of the 1994-1995 Champions League, after confirming that it had bought a game in the French league against Valenciennes and that the French Federation withdrew the title of champion of League 1993-1994.
He then banned Belgian Anderlecht from participating in its competitions for a case related to match-buying in the 1998/99 season.
Macedonian Pobeda was also sanctioned with an eight-year ban from participating in European competitions for manipulating the result of a match in the previous round of the Champions League in 2004.
