2023-10-18 11:08:44
BarcelonaThe current president of Barça, Joan Laporta, since this morning has also been charged in the Negreira case after the judge in charge of the case, Joaquín Aguirre, extended the investigation until July 2008, a period that already includes the his first term at the Blaugrana club, which lasted from 2003 to 2010. The judge attributes to Laporta a crime of bribery or, alternatively, one of corruption between individuals in the sporting modality, in addition to others of disloyal administration and falsehood documentary, according to the resolution of the court of inquiry number 1 of Barcelona to which the ARA has had access.
The judge has recalculated the statute of limitations for criminal liability and this has led to the fact that, in addition to former Barça presidents Sandro Rosell (2010-2013) and Josep Maria Bartomeu (2013-2020), Laporta is also part of the investigation into the allegedly illicit payments by the Barcelona club to José María Enríquez Negreira, vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), and his son, Javier Enríquez Romero, through the companies Dasnil 95 SL, Nilsad SCP and Soccercam SL.
According to the report drawn up by the Tax Agency on these payments, Barça, under Laporta’s mandate, paid these companies 67,625 euros in 2004; 29,629 in 2005; 117,276 in 2006; 209,500 in 2007; 223,555 in 2008; 331,062 in 2009; 477,222 in 2010. Thus, in total, during this period led by Laporta, Barça paid 1,455,869 euros which, according to Laporta himself, Rosell and Bartomeu, were used to obtain arbitration reports and, in no case, for the referees to favor sportingly the Blaugrana team. The Prosecutor’s Office, which suspects that the club had the former vice-president of the CTA “in the pay” to win the favor of the referees, does not see it the same, nor the judge in the case who insists in his latest resolution that this is the only one. logical deduction” that explains the payments to Negreira and the son.
There are two keys that explain why the judge was able to turn back the clock to 2008 to investigate Laporta: unlike the Prosecutor’s Office, which only sees a crime of sports corruption in the Negreira case, the judge decided at the end of September that the crime that best fits the case is bribery. For the magistrate, the position held by the former vice-president of the CTA is comparable to that of a public official, even though the RFEF does not have this condition on paper. Now the judge adds a new reasoning and explains that it is necessary to apply the continued modality of the crime of bribery, because otherwise the investigated would add up to as many crimes as payments Barça had made to Negreira between 2008 and 2018. “As the penalty would be notoriously high, the legislator has used the figure of the so-called ‘continuous crime’ regulated in article 74 of the Penal Code”, recalls the judge.
The crime of continued bribery is punishable by up to seven and a half years in prison and has a longer statute of limitations, of 10 years, which is what allows the last two years of Laporta’s first term at Barça to be reached. This modality of the crime does not only apply to Laporta, but also to the rest of the people investigated in the Negreira case: Barça, Rosell, Bartomeu, two ex-directors of the club, the ex-vice-president of the CTA and his son. In these last two cases, they would also face a special disqualification to exercise a longer public office, because the judge maintains that they must have this consideration of civil servants.
More managers in the spotlight
In his latest resolution, the judge in the case also recalls that the condition of being investigated for continued bribery could also be extended to all former Barça executives who had been related to the payments to the Negreiras between 2008 and 2018, which could do more the list of defendants is long. At the moment, however, the judge does not identify them or attribute this condition to them yet. In this period, under the mandate of Joan Laporta, the following people were managers of Barça: Xavier Sala i Martín, Jacint Borràs, Jordi Torrent, Jaume Ferrer, Josep Antoni Colomer, Rafa Yuste, Maria Elena Fort, Josep Cubells, Joan Boix , Albert Perrín, Alfons Godall, Alfonso Castro, Xavier Bagués, Josep Ignasi Macià, Magda Oranich and Patrick Auset.
The magistrate insists that Barça paid the Negreiras for 18 years for the position of vice-president of the CTA that the father held for almost two decades. By now, and pending reports from the Civil Guard, he considers that it can be “inferred” that these alleged commissions “satisfied the club’s interests” and resulted in “biased arbitration designations” or “warnings” to the referees selected to whistle for Barça in an ordinary way. According to the judge, this caused “an inequality in the treatment of other teams and the consequent systemic corruption of the whole of Spanish refereeing”. Despite everything, Aguirre clarifies that this does not mean that all the referees were corrupt, “but a group of them.”
During the press conference to present the closing of the 2022-2023 financial year and the budget for the 2023-2024 academic year, Barça’s economic vice-president, Eduard Romeu, was asked about this matter and limited himself to answering that the subject “is in the hands of the club’s legal services” and that it is not up to him to make any assessment on this matter. “The Negreira case means that we have to be justifying things that we would not like to have to justify. The issue is that you repeatedly have to keep repeating this issue,” he also said.
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