BARCELONA.- The former number two of the Spanish referees, José María Enríquez Negreira, refused this Tuesday to testify before the judge which investigates the payments that Barcelona made to some of its companies for almost two decades.
Negreira, 78, has taken advantage of his right not to testify before Judge Joaquín Aguirre, judicial sources reported this Tuesday.
Aguirre, who had postponed this appearance on several occasions, is investigating the payments made by Barcelona to companies owned by Negreira, who was number two among Spanish referees for 25 years.
The judge decided to summon Negreira after concluding, based on various medical reports, that, although he suffers from some memory impairment, he has sufficient mental faculties to face a trial.
At first, Negreira’s defense had asked him not to testify, alleging that he suffered from dementia.
Negreira is the first investigator to appear before the judge in this case, in which Barcelona, its current president Joan Laporta, and his two predecessors in office, Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, among others, also appear as defendants.
The prosecutor’s office accuses the investigated crimes of “corruption between individuals in the sports field”, “disloyal administration” and “falsehood in commercial documents”, to which Judge Aguirre added another of “bribery”.
All of them are being investigated for these payments to Negreira’s companies that would have occurred from 2001 to 2018, when Negreira left his position as vice president of the Technical Committee of Arbitrators (CTA), which organizes Spanish arbitration.
Barcelona controversy:
According to the Prosecutor’s complaint, Negreira would have collected 7.3 million euros ($7.9 million) from Barcelona through his companies between those years.
The Spanish justice system is trying to find out if these payments could have been used to try to influence the competition in some way, something that Barcelona denies, alleging that they were due to arbitration reports.
“Apart from the judge’s hypothesis, which says that we have bought referees, something that is not true, there is ours that we have never denied, which is that we have paid money for technical advisory services on referees,” he said in October past the president of Barça, Joan Laporta.
For the Barça president, this entire case responds to a campaign to discredit Barça, which will end “in an acquittal.”
Source: AFP
