Courts The Prosecutor's Office accuses Barcelona of buying referees

The complaint from the Barcelona Prosecutor's Office for the 'Negreira case' is already in the hands of the Examining Court number 1 of Barcelona

Courts The Prosecutor's Office accuses Barcelona of buying referees

The complaint from the Barcelona Prosecutor's Office for the 'Negreira case' is already in the hands of the Examining Court number 1 of Barcelona. The Public Ministry accuses the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), José María Enríquez Negreira, the former presidents of Barça, Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, their directors, Óscar Grau and Albert Soler.

He also accuses the club itself as a legal entity, for a continuous crime of corruption in business, in its modality of sports fraud, another of unfair administration and another of false commercial documents.

The Prosecutor's Office points out that "through the presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, Barça reached and maintained a strictly confidential verbal agreement" with the accused Enríquez Negreira.

This agreement would be based on the fact that, in his capacity as vice president of the CTA, Enríquez Negreria, "in exchange for money, would carry out actions tending to favor Barcelona in the decision-making of the referees in the matches that the club played and thus in the competition results"

It must be taken into account that the designation for each match of the official Spanish competitions at the state and professional level is carried out within the CTA, which also carries out evaluations -in which the defendant participated- for promotions and demotions. of the referees and proposes the candidates for international referees.

Regarding the alleged bribery of referees, article 286.4 of the Penal Code establishes that a crime of corruption in business will be committed by "the directors, administrators, employees or collaborators of a sports entity, whatever its legal form, as well as athletes, referees or judges, with respect to those conducts whose purpose is to deliberately and fraudulently predetermine or alter the result of a test, meeting or sports competition of special economic or sports relevance". This is one of the crimes for which the Prosecutor's Office accuses Barcelona as a legal entity.

The Prosecutor's Office calculates that from 2001 to 2018 Negreira earned more than 7.3 million euros, to which the prosecutor points out: "It was a real remuneration not provided for in the club's statutes or approved by the General Assembly. In short, said perceptions They had no legal or statutory support." His complaint states that two Negreira companies issued invoices to Barça "without them responding to any real technical advisory services or services", and specifies that he invoiced Barça 2,971,673.01 euros between 2014 and 2018.

The letter adds that the bank accounts where Negreira received the payments "were almost entirely fed by the income from the FCB, which were withdrawn, for the most part, by bearer checks" collected by third parties at the request of Negreira, at the request of Negreira. who then delivered the cash. Negreira was relieved of the CTA in May 2018 and then Barça stopped paying him, for which Negreira reproached Bartomeu in a burofax.

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