Barcelona in trouble: he paid 1.4 million to the vice president of Spanish referees
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Barcelona is at the center of a case which, according to some Iberian media, could soon turn into the biggest scandal in Spanish football. According to Ser Catalunya, the radio broadcaster of the Cadena Ser group, the Catalan club would have paid almost 1.4 million euros for three years, between 2016 and 2018, to a private company attributable to José María Enríquez Negreira, at the time of the made vice president of the Technical Committee of the referees of the Spanish Football Federation.
Also according to the Catalan radio station, Barcelona would have paid the last invoice in June 2018, at the same time as the establishment of a new Technical Referee Committee and with Negreira himself leaving the body.
The arbitrator dismisses the charges
Barcelona was the company’s main and almost exclusive source of income, which remained inactive and without billing since the year following the Blaugrana club’s last payment. The former La Liga referee, questioned by Cadena Ser, stated that “there was no favorable treatment” towards Barcelona in any decision or arbitration appointment and that his job consisted of verbally advising the club in particular on the behavior that the players should have had on the pitch depending on the referee appointed for the matches.
Barcelona, as reported by the Spanish tax agency itself in one of its minutes, claimed to have turned to him to make sure “that everything was neutral”. Before the Spanish Tax Agency, Negreira argued that even after leaving the Arbitration Committee he would insist on the need to outsource his services to control certain aspects, such as the Var.
The investigation
The investigation stems from an inspection by the same tax agency of the former arbitrator’s company, Dasnil 95 Sl, from which it would have emerged that Barcelona would have made three annual tranches of payments for 2016 (532,728.02 euros), 2017 (541,752) and 2018 (318,200) for a total of 1,392,680 euros. In addition to the former referee, his son Javier Enriquez Romero also worked in the company as sole director. He too told the inspectors that he had received consultancy payments from Barcelona and that he had also delivered specific reports to the Blaugrana club.
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