The Negreira affair is far from over on the Barcelona side… This Thursday, the headquarters of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), located in Las Rozas de Madrid, was also searched by the Spanish Civil Guard. As a reminder, the Catalan club is still accused of having paid several million euros to the former referee and vice-president of the CTA of the Spanish Football Federation between 1994 and 2018. In the last hours, judge Joaquin Aguirre Lopez thus decided that the trial would continue over payments of 7.7 million euros to Negreira between 2001 and 2018, for what the club claims were “technical reports” on the referees.
To obtain advice on arbitration matters, the reigning Spanish champion would, in fact, have made several suspicious payments to the company Dasnil 95, which belongs to José Maria Enriquez Negreira. Then, the money payments would have stopped in 2018, the year the former official left his position on the sidelines of the restructuring of the CTA. Subsequently, the latter would then have threatened Barça to reveal the scandal publicly. For his part, the president of FC Barcelona Joan Laporta affirmed last March that his club did not “never bought from a referee”.
The dissolution of the club mentioned among the risks of sanction…
Yes, but now, named among the accused – alongside former presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu, Sandro Rosell and Negreira’s son, Javier Enríquez – FC Barcelona can, as such, fear the worst. According to the latest information from Telegraph, the Culers risk, quite simply, being banned from professional football! If this sentence would be the supreme sanction for the Blaugranas, the judge would consider for his part that Negreira was considered a public official at the time of the alleged offenses. A status which would then aggravate the accusation of corruption.
Furthermore, the English media specifies that the sentences for the individuals concerned – and cited above – could range from three to six years in prison. If its activities as a professional football club were suspended, Barça, 124 years old, would then come very close to bankruptcy. Already forced to deal with a delicate financial situation, the Barcelona club – which is seeing its economic health deteriorate a little further with the renovation work at the Camp Nou – therefore risks experiencing the next few weeks that are stressful to say the least. One thing is certain, this affair has not stopped being talked about in Spain and elsewhere….
