Joan Laporta, the current president of the FC Barcelona football club, has in turn been charged in the investigation into the arbitration scandal involving the Catalan club, Spanish justice announced on Wednesday.
Published
Reading time :
1 minute
:quality(50)/2023/10/18/000-33u44yk-652fab491ebe0427576221.jpg)
A new big name in the Spanish football league has just been added to the long list of defendants in the arbitration corruption case on Wednesday October 18. FC Barcelona and its ex-presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell had already been indicted, as had José Maria Enriquez Negreira, the former senior official of Spanish arbitration, and his son.
This case has been going on since spring 2022, when a preliminary investigation was opened by the Spanish public prosecutor’s office in order to verify the motive and framework of money payments to a company owned by Enriquez Negreira. The facts in question date back to the period between 2001 and 2018, during which Joan Laporta, the current president, was at the head of the club from 2003 to 2010.
If the facts could have been the subject of a statute of limitations, the judge in charge of the investigation explains that this is not possible given the seriousness of the accusations: the Catalan club paid a total of more than 7.3 million euros to Mr. Negreira between 2001 and 2018, via the company owned by the former referee. If corruption is proven, the protagonists face a sentence of six months to four years in prison. The Negreira scandal has been poisoning the life of Barça for months, which denies any irregularity. However, a search of the headquarters of the Technical Committee of Arbitrators (CTA), the Spanish arbitration management, last September allowed the investigation to take on a new dimension.