Barcelona, (EFE)
As the newspaper “El País” has advanced and legal sources have confirmed to EFE, the complaint, which will be presented shortly in the courts of Barcelona, accuses the Barça club and its former president of a crime of corruption in business.
The complaint is the result of investigations that the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office has been open for nearly a year for alleged payments to Negreira, who through a company has received almost seven million euros from Barça for allegedly verbal advice to the club.
The Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office has already drawn up a draft complaint, which is now being reviewed by the State Attorney General’s Office, in which it accuses FC Barcelona of a crime of corruption in business in its continued modality.
The public ministry had opened proceedings since May 2022, which it entrusted to the National Police, for alleged fiscal irregularities committed by the Negreira company, which exposed the millionaire payments received by the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Arbitrators ( CTA).
The Prosecutor’s Office will present its complaint for the payments to the arbitrator in the courts of Barcelona for its distribution, although it is not ruled out that the case ends up in the hands of the investigating court number 1 of the Catalan capital, which last week received a complaint from the arbitrator of the VAR Estrada Fernández against Negreira, not yet admitted for processing.
Laporta: “Barça has never bought referees”
The president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, reiterated this Tuesday that the club he directs “has never bought referees nor has it had the intention of doing so” and that, shortly, he will call a press conference to give the pertinent explanations about the ‘case Negreira’.
“We have never had the intention of buying referees. Absolutely never ”, insisted Laporta, during his participation in a colloquium organized by the Círculo Ecuestre, where he reviewed the situation of the Barça entity when today marks two years since their victory in the last elections.
For the leader, “the forcefulness of the facts contradicts those who are trying to change the story” and “nothing is accidental”, since he considers that, now that Barça “is going well again”, there is an orchestrated campaign to harm their interests: “There is the will to drown us economically to lead us to be a public limited company.”