The investigating judge in the Negreira case, Joaquín Aguirre, intended to open a separate case for money laundering to investigate the intermediation carried out between the Negreiras and the club by the then director of the social area, Josep Contreras, who died in 2022, but the Court forced him to investigate everything together. The main purpose of the case is to determine whether FC Barcelona paid the vice president of the Referees’ Technical Committee for 17 years in exchange for referee favors. However, during the investigation it was noted that the money that Barça paid directly to Negreira’s company was done in a different way starting in 2016. Then it was the manager’s company, Josep Contreras, named Tresep, that received money from Barça. for delivering the arbitration reports provided to him by Negeira’s son, Javier Enríquez. From there it could be deduced that the club’s funds could have ended up in the pocket of a manager, which would exonerate Barça from having paid for referee favors. This was the second line of investigation.
Judge Aguirre considered that this second line of investigation related to “the crime of money laundering and the corporate plot around Tresep could be very long and would block the processing of the main investigation for no reason.” The instructor considered that “the facts that are the subject of the main investigation – that of the alleged arbitration favors – can be judged without the need to conclude the Tresep and money laundering investigation.” “There is no indication of how it may affect the imperative need to conclude the investigation into money laundering or the intermediation of Tresep so that it can be judged whether or not the payments made by FC Barcelona to the Negreira family constitute a crime,” he stressed. Judge.
The Barcelona Court, however, has estimated the appeals filed by Enríquez Negreira, his son and FC Barcelona, ??who considered that everything should be investigated jointly and recognizes that at the moment it is not known where those funds went or if there could be laundering since it has not been determined whether the origin of the payments was criminal. “It does not appear from the case that someone has acquired, possesses, uses, converts or transmits assets knowing that they have their origin in a criminal activity, so in the absence of indicative elements that justify the investigation of the crime of money laundering, the training is not applicable. of a separate piece,” the court maintains, adding: “it is noted that it is unknown at this time what the destination of these funds could have been.”
Josep Contreras was a manager of FC Barcelona in various stages, under the presidency of Josep Lluís Núñez, Joan Gaspart and Josep Maria Bartomeu and he was also a close friend of the president of the Spanish Federation, Ángel María Villar. In his last era, he was a member of Barça’s social commission and acted as an intermediary between the club and Negreira’s son. In 2016, his company Tresep hired the services of Javier Enríquez to prepare referee reports. Contreras passed the bill to Barça with a 33% increase due to intermediation. According to the summary, it was a way to avoid linking the Negreira surname with Barça, a somewhat strange maneuver since his father had been billing the club directly since at least 2003. Contreras was being investigated in the Soule case for an alleged crime of diverting funds from the Catalan Federation and the Treasury suspects that in this case he could have used his companies to divert funds from Barça by presenting false or inflated invoices.
The judicial investigation of the Negreira case focuses on finding the reason why FC Barcelona paid 7.3 million euros over 17 years to the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees and where the money went. If Negreira kept it or he diverted it to other people, managers or people linked to the club. To do this, the Civil Guard is analyzing one by one the 72 bank accounts that the former number two of the referees managed throughout the seventeen years of his relationship with FC Barcelona.
