Revelations are multiplying Friday in Spain around the investigation into possible fraudulent payments of several million euros made by FC Barcelona to a former referee of the federation.
New information from the Spanish daily El Mundo shook FC Barcelona again on the night of Thursday to Friday, just after the 2-2 draw conceded by Xavi’s players at Camp Nou against Manchester United in the Europa League.
According to the Spanish newspaper, FC Barcelona has paid more than 6 million euros (6,659,488 euros) since 2001 to José Maria Enriquez Negreira, former number two in Spanish arbitration between 1994 and 2018, to advise the club on arbitration matters. An amount well above the 1.4 million euros announced so far by the Spanish media.
And when the Spanish Technical Arbitral Committee (CTA) was dismembered and restructured in 2018, and Barça decided to stop payments, Mr Negreira, dismissed from his position in the federation, sent a fax to the club Catalan on February 5, 2019 to threaten him with revealing a “scandal”, according to El Mundo.
The online investigative media El Confidential revealed on Friday that two other companies are in the sights of Spanish justice in this case: one (Soccercam SL) belonging to the son of Negreira, and the other (Tresep 2014 SL) to Josep Contreras Arjona, a former Barca manager, whose business was allegedly used to funnel payments to the former referee.
“If I saw that we won by cheating…”
“If I saw that we were winning by cheating, I would go home,” reacted Xavi Thursday evening in a post-match press conference.
It all started on Wednesday, when Spanish radio Cadena Ser revealed that the Spanish prosecutor’s office had been investigating for several months the company of a former leader of a Spanish referees committee who allegedly received 1.4 million between 2016 and 2018. euros from FC Barcelona, for an alleged offense of private corruption.
According to Cadena Ser, the investigation would have started after the identification by the Spanish tax authorities of irregularities in the taxes paid by the company Dasnil 95, owned by José Maria Enriquez Negreira.
The former referee has denied any favor done to the Blaugrana club. His duties, according to his statements to reporters, were limited to providing mostly verbal advice on matters such as the behavior of players in front of referees.
After these revelations, Wednesday afternoon, FC Barcelona immediately reacted through a press release. Without directly naming Dasnil 95, the Catalan club explained that it had in the past a contract with an “external supplier” from which it received, among other things, “technical reports related to professional arbitration”, a “common practice in professional football clubs.
Currently, this task falls to “a professional in the football sector”, added the club.
The federation and La Liga demand accountability
According to Josep Maria Bartomeu, president of Barça between 2014 and 2020, the club had decided to do without the services of this company after the restructuring of the CTA in 2018, in order to save money.
On Thursday, the Integrity Department of the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) issued a statement in which it said it required “information” from the former RFEF and Barça referees to take the “corresponding measures”.
La Liga, the body that manages professional football in Spain, also reacted through the voice of its president Javier Tebas: “We have already checked, and it is impossible that there are sports disciplinary sanctions” against FC Barcelona , because “the limitation period for this type of sanction is three years”, and that five years have passed since the facts.
If the Spanish prosecution opens a trial, “we will have to present ourselves as a private prosecutor. And if there is no trial, all of this will be closed”. “Ethically and for our image, this kind of thing cannot happen in Spanish football,” Tebas added.