Prosecutors have convicted FC Barcelona, its former presidents Josep María Bartomeu and Sandro Rosella, for alleged millions in payments to former arbitration chief José María Enríquez Negreira. “Give preference” to Barça in “referencing” the matches they have played.
The prosecutor’s office, which proposes to the current president of Barca, Joan Laporte, summoned as a witness, submitted his complaint to the Court of Investigation No. 1 of Barcelona to accumulate it in the previous legal proceedings initiated as a result of the complaint filed by the referee of the VAR Estrada Fernández v. Negreira-, for the crimes of corruption between individuals, bad administration and falsification of documents .
The complaint is the result of an investigation that the Barcelona prosecutor’s office has been conducting for almost a year on suspicion of paying Negreira.who, through two companies, received almost seven million euros from Barça for supposedly verbal advice to the club.
Apart from Rosell, who was President of FC Barcelona from 2010 to 2014, and Bartomeu from 2014 to 2020,the complaint is directed against former club chief executive Oscar Grau and former professional sports director Albert Soler, who had “the highest confidence” in Bartomeu, the public ministry said.
Prosecutors allege that, through presidents Rosell and Bartomeu, the Barça club “reached and maintained” a “strictly confidential verbal agreement” with the then vice-president of the Technical Committee of the Referees (CTA) José María Enríquez Negreira, so that “in the exchange of money”, to comply ” actions aimed at the benefit of FC Barcelona in the decision-making of the referees.
According to prosecutors, FC Barcelona’s payments to Negreira between 2001 and 2018, during his vice-presidency of the CTA, they exceeded €7.3 million, which was a “real remuneration” not provided for by the club’s statutes and not approved by the general meeting, so that these representations did not have “some legal or statutory support”. .
In particular, the State Ministry reports that between 2011 and 2014 (at the Roselle stage), Negreira received more than two million euros from FC Barcelona through his sellers, while from 2014 to 2015 he received 1.2 million euros, and from 2016 to 2018 another 1.6 million. .
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Source: La Opinion
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