uncomfortable truths and questions that Barça must answer

BarcelonaWith three days to go until two weeks have passed since the first publication related to the Negreira case, the Prosecutor’s Office has not filed a complaint against the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Arbitrators (CTA). The public ministry has also not launched legal actions against Barça, which for two decades paid around seven million euros to different companies of the former Catalan player in exchange for advice. Although the noise generated by the suspicions of the payment of arbitration favors has not stopped growing since SER Catalunya uncovered the controversy, the investigation remains mainly focused on the period 2016-2018, when the company Dasnil 95 perceived 1.6 million corresponding to 33 invoices sent to the Blaugrana club, then chaired by Josep Maria Bartomeu, who in 2018 cut the agreement with Negreira’s company, domiciled in Barcelona’s Guinardó district.

The Treasury only focused on the last two years of the business relationship because any previous irregularities would have prescribed. It is here that the Prosecutor’s Office has the power to prosecute the case with a lawsuit for corruption between individuals or disloyal administration; because Bartomeu and the boards that have governed Barça since the beginning of the century have recognized the relationship and payments with Negreira’s companies and, therefore, the two exercises that the Tax Agency has put under the microscope are only the tip of a iceberg with several unanswered questions and some uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that for years the Catalan club had been paying – at an overcharge, according to experts in the sector – in exchange for services that it now has internalized and that were provided by companies that were owned of a high arbitral position. In addition, the investigation shows that Dasnil 95 based its survival on the income it received from Barça, as shown by the fact that it ceased its activity when Bartomeu cut off its tap in 2018, precisely the year in which Negreira , who today claims the onset of Alzheimer’s, finished his term at the CTA.

Dasnil i Nisdal, a pervers anagram

Because the inquiries that have been documented, leaked and published are limited to the period 2016-2018, the specific details of the contractual relationship in previous seasons, under the tenures of Gaspart, Laporta and Rosell, are more confusing. In this sense, when Bartomeu declared in the newspaper Abc that the current Barcelona manager “quadrupled” the former referee’s fees in his first term, did not refer to a satisfied increase in Dasnil 95, but to the resumption of the bond with Negreira in the 2005-06 season, after three years off, with payments to a different company: Nisdal. So it appears in the papers of Football Leakswhich reveal from the organization’s documentation that, under the first Laporta government, the former vice-president of the CTA recovered and increased the emoluments that the Gaspart board had paid him through Dasnil 95 in 2002 (136,000 euros more VAT) through a private civil society named by virtue of a simple anagram.

According to this leak, Nisdal increasingly invoiced a total of 4.37 million between 2005 and 2015, when Negreira rescued the CIF of Dasnil 95 to collect the controversial advices, which have been the subject of the investigation by the Treasury , those that point to Bartomeu’s government. At that time, the annual collaboration exceeded half a million euros, “a barbarity” defined by the former vice-president for sports culture, Jordi Mestre, in RAC1. The one of the current board, Rafael Yuste, who was also in the position between 2008 and 2010, keeps silent like Laporta while an external audit is completed to clarify some payments that in 2015 and 2016 also went to the Negreira’s son, Javier Enríquez, through a third company, Tresep 2014, owned by Josep Contreras, a former member of the Barça sports commission who died at the end of 2022. Contreras received almost half of the 394,460 euros he paid Barça for Enríquez’s work, according to data from the Prosecutor’s Office.

In this framework of business hacking, it is equally noteworthy that Dasnil 95, who according to the records of the directives of Rosell and Bartomeu did not receive payments from Barça between 2005 and 2015, presented income of hundreds of thousands of euros during this time and devoted around 70% of this income to pay the Treasury and third parties, when its structure was rather meager. The ARA has asked ex-managers and ex-workers of Barça if they are aware that Nisdal invoiced the entity and then Dasnil 95 invoiced Nisdal, but has not obtained any answer. And it is that beyond the shadow of buying referees, the main reason for scandal in the Spanish state, one of the doubts that beats is whether the mode of operation that followed with Contreras – commission on an invoice paid by Barça – was isolated or recurrent. Given the overcharge, investigators will follow the money trail.

Reputational damage at the doors of the Espai Barça financing firm

Be that as it may, managers of the last decades at Can Barça are clear that the matter will not go much further. “We didn’t buy referees, and if we had bought them, with 300,000 euros a year we didn’t even have one to begin with,” jokes one of them. “The payments are not illicit, there is nothing illegal,” says another. Now, another thing is the reputational damage that all of this causes in the eyes of the football world. In this sense, the Camp Nou offices fear consequences in the negotiation of the last fringes of the bond issue that must be used to pay for the comprehensive reform of the stadium. “Banks don’t like noise and now we’re having a lot of it,” says Arístides Maillol.