The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has appealed the accusation of the president of Barcelona, Joan Laporta, in the Negreira case, concluding that his possible crimes would have prescribed in July 2020, without him being able to be considered responsible for the payments made by the boards of directors that succeeded him. In their appeal, to which EFE has had access, prosecutors Luis García Cantón and Ricardo Sanz-Garea ask the Barcelona Court to revoke the order in which the investigating judge agrees to investigate Laporta because he considers that the payments made between 2008 and 2010 to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) José María Enríquez Negreira have not expired.
Judge Joaquín Aguirre argues in his order that the statute of limitations for continued bribery is ten years – which must be counted backwards – from the date of the last payment to Negreira, in July 2018, and insists that the crime is attributable to the different presidents who succeeded one another at Barça, because the “paying” party was always the same, the club. Prosecutors, however, disagree with the calculation carried out by the judge and the “temporal direction” in which he applies the statute of limitations, which they believe should be counted from the last criminal offense to the present. According to the appeal, Laporta ended his presidency on June 30, 2010, so the responsibility for his possible crimes “prescribed ten years later, far from March 2023, in which the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office was admitted. ”.
There are no signs of a pact between presidents
Another of the arguments discussed by prosecutors is the theory of “adhesive authorship” on which the judge relied to hold all Barça presidents responsible for the payments that the club made to Negreira between the years 2001 and 2018, which totaled 7 .3 million euros. For prosecutors, Laporta can only be held accountable for the “facts or omissions” over which he could have “control”, without there being the “slightest indication” that there was an “agreement, connivance, agreement or concert between the successive leaders of the FCB” in relation to the payments to Negreira. In this sense, the public ministry recalls that throughout the investigation of the case, “the option has never been raised—not even as a mere possibility” of the existence of an “agreement” between the presidents under investigation and the people who formed part of its successive boards of directors.
“At no time has it been considered that the different participants acted in a kind of distribution of roles with casual reciprocal contributions that could give rise to what has been called joint imputation,” the appeal emphasizes. According to the Anti-Corruption prosecutors, each president and each board of directors “is responsible—if applicable—for the payments made to Mr. Enríquez Negreira during the period in which they held their positions, without the payments being attributed, for example, to Mr. Rosell. Bartomeu could have made it or this one could have been made by Mr. Laporta.”
The Prosecutor’s Office clarifies in its brief that the appeal against Laporta’s accusation does not imply that the public ministry disagrees that the investigating judge has charged those investigated by the prosecutor with a crime of bribery. Negreira case, understanding that the position of vice president of the CTA can be considered analogous to that of a public official for criminal purposes. The accusation of bribery has been appealed before the Barcelona Court by the defenses of the former presidents of Barça Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell and by the club itself, although the Prosecutor’s Office has not yet ruled on this criminal classification. In that sense, the letter insists that the Prosecutor’s Office’s approach “is exactly the same, whether or not the alleged payments made by the FCB to Enríquez Negreira and his son are considered bribery.”
You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#Prosecutors #Office #appeals #Laportas #accusation #Negreira #case