The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office supports Barça and Joan Laporta because it considers that the Negreira case cannot be investigated for a crime of bribery. The judge handling the matter, Joaquín Aguirre, considered that the payments he received from the club José María Enríquez Negreira could fit into bribery, although it is a crime reserved only for public officials. Barça, Laporta and the rest of the investigated, including Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, filed an appeal before the Barcelona Court of Appeal to overturn the judge’s decision, as they completely reject his interpretation. The Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had to pronounce on the matter, agrees with those investigated and considers that Negreira cannot be considered a public official. If the Court accepts the appeals and joins the thesis, Joan Laporta would be out of the case.
Before the arrival of Judge Aguirre to the case after a period of leave, the case had always revolved around two crimes: that of unfair administration, which means that overcharges were paid for a service that was provided or for a non-existent service, or for sports corruption, which means having altered the competition. However, the judge changed the course of the investigation including the alleged commission of a crime of bribery. This crime punishes the public official who accepts money to do an act contrary to the exercise of his position. Therefore, to be able to introduce the crime before it was necessary to consider Negreira as a public official. For this reason, the judge did a new legal trick: he had to consider the Spanish Federation as “a public entity for criminal purposes”.
“The Spanish Football Federation has the status of a legal public entity for criminal purposes and its managers, including those who are part of technical commissions, must be considered public officials for criminal purposes”, the judge pointed out. In this way, since Negreira was the vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees, an entity that depends on the Spanish Federation, the judge went on to consider him a public official “for criminal purposes”. With the application of this crime, which later became statute-barred, he managed to include Laporta among those investigated, even though his action had been considered statute-barred at all times.
