The Prosecutor’s Office decided this Tuesday to file a complaint before the ordinary courts against Barcelona, for the payments by the Barça club to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) José María Enríquez Negreira, to whom the culé entity paid seven million euros between 2001 and 2018. The Prosecutor’s Office accuses Barça of a crime in continued corruption in sport and points directly to Josep Maria Bartomeu, president of the Catalan club between 2014 and 2020, although it was he who broke the entity’s controversial contract with Enríquez Negreira.
While the investigation by the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office has been paralyzed as a result of the criminal complaint filed by VAR referee Xavier Estrada Fernández against Enríquez Negreira and his son, for corruption and sports fraud, Barça will be tried as a legal entity by a crime of corruption in business, which includes fraud in the sports field and came into force with the reform of the Penal Code of 2010. As it is an alleged ongoing crime, the penalties would be more serious, both for Barcelona and for the Joan Laporta’s predecessor in the club’s presidency, also investigated by UEFA. The highest body of European football could even punish Barça with its exclusion from continental competitions for at least one season.
Bartomeu would be the only president of Barcelona indicted for the scandal of the payments to Enríquez Negreira, in addition to members of his board of directors, and it will be a Barcelona court that decides whether or not to admit the complaint of the Public Prosecutor for processing, as announced by the newspaper El País. The crime of corruption in business incorporated into the 2010 penal reform was modified in 2015 and therefore Bartomeu would be the only president of Barcelona who would sit on the bench for the ‘Negreira case’, while the previous leaders -Joan Gaspart, Joan Laporta and Sandro Rosell-, despite maintaining their relationship with number 2 of the arbitration group, they would not be investigated, as the facts had prescribed.
Barça could not be penalized in Spanish competitions, since according to the current Sports Law, and also the previous one, very serious offenses prescribe after three years, but UEFA threatens the blaugrana club after also investigating the case and the information sent by LaLiga and the Spanish Football Federation (FEF). Before learning that the Prosecutor’s Office will denounce Barcelona and Bartomeu, Joan Laporta categorically denied that the club will try to buy the referees to influence their decisions. «Barça has never bought nor has it had the intention of buying referees. Absolutely never. We are going well again, and nothing is accidental, “commented the culé leader to delve into the victimizing role of the Catalan club.
#Prosecutors #Office #denounce #Barça #continued #sports #corruption #truth