It’s time for a counter-attack on the Barça side. Shaken for two months by an arbitration scandal now known as the “Negreira affair”, the Catalan club organized a press conference on Monday to defend its version of the facts in this story of payments to a former senior referee, who led Spanish justice to indict the club and its former presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell in mid-March.
Offensive, current president Joan Laporta assured that Barça had “never done anything to obtain a sporting advantage”, referring to a “smear campaign” against his club. “FC Barcelona has never had the final objective or intention of distorting the competition, insisted the Catalan leader. He had no capacity to appoint arbitrators [pour] change sports results. »
According to the prosecution, the Catalan club would have paid more than 7.3 million euros to the former number 2 of Spanish arbitration Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira between 2001 and 2018, in exchange for advice on arbitration matters. Barça “has concluded and maintained a strictly confidential verbal agreement” with Negreira “so that in his capacity as vice-president of the CTA and in exchange for money, he carries out actions tending to favor the FCB […] and therefore in the results of the competitions, ”assured the prosecution in a court document.
UEFA investigation
Charges rejected on Monday by Joan Laporta, for whom the prosecution “was not able to demonstrate that the payments made to the companies” owned by Negreira “could have influenced the referees or the result of any match whatsoever”. “They couldn’t demonstrate it because it wasn’t possible,” insisted the Barça president, assuring that the services for which the club made payments were legal and documented. “There was no corruption offence,” he insisted.
Last week, Barça had asked in a press release for the resignation of Javier Tebas, the boss of the Spanish League, who would have given the prosecution a letter wrongly implicating two former presidents of the club. On March 23, UEFA announced the opening of an investigation into a “possible breach of the legal framework” of the body, which could jeopardize FCB’s participation in the Champions League next season.