«They paid to avoid unfavorable decisions by the referees»- Corriere.it

Barcelona are (again) in trouble. After the sea of ​​​​debts (1.3 billion red in 2022) and the history of fake social media to attack Lionel Messi, another scandal hits the Catalan club, which for three years, between 2016 and 2018, according to the investigative hypotheses would have paid almost 1.4 million euros to a private company attributable to José María Enríquez Negreira, at the time of the events vice president of the technical committee of the referees. In short:
a real judicial and media bomb that evokes our Calciopoli
and who is currently shaking the foundations of La Liga, with accusations and counter-accusations that are already a political case, as always happens in Spain when the futbolone of the many battlegrounds between the central government and pro-independence activists.

The Blaugrana team is in fact at the top of the league, with a large advantage over rivals Real Madrid: in Catalonia there are many who argue that the case is being raised just now for exactly this reason. As reported by the Madrid newspaper As and by the issuer Ser Catalunyathe investigation started following a tax audit of the same company, Enríquez Negreira’s Dasnil 95 SL. From there the taxation opened an investigation. The news was confirmed by the person concerned who, however, assured that there has never been favorable treatment for Barcelona. These payments, for which he provided no invoices, were due to a consultancy work, which consisted of explaining to the players how they should deal with each referee. The Blaugrana company immediately announced that it will take “legal action against anyone who ruins our image with insinuations”, a concept reiterated by President Joan Laporta: “We will defend our honour”. The investigators found no documentation of the services provided by the former arbitrator, who defended himself by saying that his reports were all oral. The Spanish Football Federation has instead issued a statement in which it distances itself from Enríquez Nogueira and affirms that “none of its members can carry out functions that risk generating a conflict of interest”.

According to the Blaugrana, that mountain of money (532,728 euros in 2016, 541,752 in 2017 and 318,200 in 2018) was paid in exchange for reports on referees, “a common practice in all clubs”. But the investigators of the Revenue Agency suspect arbitration favors: “Barcelona wanted to make sure that unfavorable decisions were not made by the referees, that is, that everything was neutral”. We are only at the beginning, but according to the media close to madridismo «we could be facing the biggest scandal in the history of Spanish football».