The facts date back to a period between 2016 and 2018. According to the blaugrana they were in exchange for whistle reports. But investigators suspect arbitration favors
A referee scandal is shaking the eve of Barcelona, engaged tomorrow in the Europa League against Manchester United. The radio program “Qué t’hi jugues” (Cadena Ser Barcelona) and the Madrid-based newspaper As revealed that Barcelona paid over €1.3m to a former referee in 2016, 2017 and 2018, who at the time was the vice-president of the Spanish arbitration committee. Barcelona, through a press release, has tried to explain the reason for the payments and has threatened lawsuits for all those who make assumptions or link the club to illegal activities.
the two versions
—
The matter came out thanks to an inspection by the Spanish tax authorities, made suspicious by some invoices issued by a company called Dasnil 95. The sole shareholder of Dasnil 95 is José Maria Enriquez Negreira, a referee in La Liga between 1980 and 1992 who then moved on to deputy management of whistles in the Spanish committee. According to what emerged from the tax investigation, Dasnil 95 collected 532,728 euros from Barcelona in 2016, 541,752 in 2017 and 318,200 in 2018. According to Barcelona, money was paid in exchange for reports on the referees, “a common practice in all ” according to what we read in the press release of the Catalan club. For the investigators, however, “Barcelona wanted to make sure that no unfavorable decisions were made by the referees, or also that everything was neutral”.
since 2009
—
The invoices were issued by the Blaugrana junta directed by the then president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who however made it known that he had inherited the thing from the Laporta management, because the service had been in place since 2009. The service was terminated in 2018 when the former referee stopped working for the Committee. Laporta returned to the presidency of the club for two years. And he did not want to make any statements in this regard, but underlined how the news comes out right now that Barça has returned to dominate La Liga. For the moment, the former Barça manager Albert Soler and the former CEO of the club Oscar Grau have been called to declare. The investigators found no documentation of the services provided by former referee Enrique Negreira, who defended himself by saying that his reports for Barcelona were all oral. And there’s more, because the former referee’s son, while his father ran the Spanish whistlers, looked after their mental health, giving coaching lessons and acting as a personal therapist for some of them. The father had to control them, the son took care of them.
conflict of interest
—
The Spanish Football Federation has issued a statement in which it distances itself from Enriquez Nogueira and states that none of its members can carry out functions that risk generating a conflict of interest, making itself available to the investigators.
February 15th – 6.30pm
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED