The Court of Instruction number 1 of Barcelona has Admitted for processing the complaint by the Prosecutor’s Office against FC Barcelona and José María Enríquez Negreira for the millionaire payments made by the Barça entity to the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA). According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, these payments made by the Catalan club between 2001 and 2018which amount to €7.3 millioncould be constitutive of a continued crime of corruption between individuals in the sports fielda continued crime of unfair administration and a continued crime of falsifying a commercial document.

In addition to FC Barcelona and Enríquez Negreira, the former presidents of the Catalan club Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, the former general director of the entity Óscar Grau and the former director of Professional Sports Albert Soler appear as denounced. Likewise, the order considers La Liga de Fútbol Profesional to have appeared as a private accusation in this proceeding, and orders the investigation of the facts denounced to the Civil Guard.

Judge Silvia López Mejía also admits to processing the complaint filed by former referee Xavier Estrada Fernández against Enríquez Negreira and the company Dasnil 95 SL for an alleged crime of sports corruption or sports fraud.

Enriquez Negreira, vice-president of the CTA between 1993 and 2018, invoiced, through the companies Dasnil 95 SL, Nilsad SCP and Soccercam SL for his services to FC Barcelona. According to the Barcelona entity, these services consisted of reports from referees, “scouting” and grassroots football.

In the case of Soccercam SL, owned by the son of Enríquez Negreira, Javier Enríquez Romero, the services that it allegedly provided to FC Barcelona between 2016 and 2018 were not billed directly to the Catalan club, but rather through a third company owned by Josep Contreras, then a member of the Board of Directors of Josep Maria Bartomeu. According to the order, this prevented “Javier Enríquez Romero from being hired directly by FC Barcelona, ​​so as not to associate the Enríquez surname with the club.”

The investigation began in July 2019

The investigation of these allegedly criminal acts originated in July 2019. Then, the Tax Agency initiated an inspection to FC Barcelona for the Corporate Tax of the years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and for the Value Added Tax of 2015, 2016 and 2017, for the payments made in relation to the invoices drawn by the companies related to Enríquez Negreira.

In said inspection, the tax authority required the club to identify “the professionals, technicians or auxiliary personnel who developed these services”, and to deliver a copy “of the videos, documents or reports in which the specific advisory work was carried out”.

Given the response from FC Barcelona “that the required documentation had not been found”, the tax inspectorate considered the expense non-deductible, in such a way that the invoices lost the presumption of validity.

According to the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office collected by the Barcelona Investigating Court number 1, the Barcelona entity, through the presidents Rosell and Bartomeu, “reached and maintained a strictly confidential agreement with José María Enríquez Negreira, so that , in his capacity as vice-president of the CTA and in exchange for money, carried out actions tending to favor FC Barcelona in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club”.

For all these reasons, the judge sees indications of the existence of a continuing crime of corruption between individuals in the sports field, a continuing crime of unfair administration and a continuing crime of falsifying a commercial document that must be investigated.

Source: Eitb

Kingston

Kingston is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.