FC Barcelona is willing to accuse Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu in the Negreira case if irregularities are found during the investigation. Joan Laporta will announce today at the long-awaited press conference on the scandal that Barça will request to bring private prosecution in the crime of unfair administration to clarify if there were leaders who took advantage of the payments to the former referee to reach into the box.
The president considers that the club's assets may have been harmed by the actions of certain former managers or people linked to the club and has ordered his lawyers to propose to the judge in the case that the club can appear as an accusation and defend its interests. Last Friday the club's lawyers communicated the new strategy to Rosell's and Bartomeu's lawyers, Pau Molins and José María Fuster-Fabra, as both have confirmed to La Vanguardia.
However, Barça conveyed in that conversation that at this point in the judicial process, the board has no intention of charging the inks against the two former presidents. In fact, there have been meetings between their lawyers and the club's representatives to set a united course to defend that Barça did not buy referees during the 17 years in which they paid 7.3 million.
Laporta, during his speech today, will ensure that at this point he has no reason to suspect the actions of his predecessors, but will point out that the Prosecutor's Office hypothesizes that there is money from the club that may have ended up in the hands of third parties with which is forced to defend the assets of the entity appearing as a private prosecution. In the event that irregularities are found regarding Rosell or Bartomeu, Barça will act.
FC Barcelona is currently being investigated as a legal entity for the crime of sports corruption, considering that it paid Negreira to alter the competition and for unfair administration, considering that the payments were for non-existent services or that an overprice was paid to enrich third persons. If the judge accepts the request, Barça would have a double condition of being investigated for one crime and accused of another.
The club has decided to make this decision after the judicial investigation found indications that former manager Josep Contreras – who died in December – could have enriched himself at Barça's expense by buying arbitration reports directly from Negreira's son and then selling them to the club for 33% more expensive. The ex-director took out the money that came in from Barça in cash and now the club wants to investigate whether those funds ended up in the hands of people linked to the entity. The contracting of the services of Negreira's son with the intermediation of Contreras was done from 2016 to 2018 during the Bartomeu stage. Laporta's and the club's strategy is clear: if it was only during that period that funds could be diverted, his previous stage at the club is no longer under suspicion.
The line of defence, as Laporta announced yesterday before a group of supporters in Madrid, goes through defending that the arbitration reports existed and were paid at market price and that the person in charge of preparing them was not Negreira but his son despite the fact that The company was in the name of the father. "What they have done here is magnify a situation in which one of the people who was linked to these companies was a former referee and a former vice president of the Referees Committee," Laporta said yesterday before the supporters clubs.
During the internal investigation that the club entrusted to the lawyer Andreu van den Eynde, nearly 600 reports on the referees made by Negreira's son have been found, which represents 150 per year. In this way, Barça will defend that Negreira was not paid for influencing arbitration but for specific work that was actually carried out and that had added value since it could only be done by someone who was in close contact with the arbitration world. .
The question, however, is whether to carry out this work it was necessary to hire the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees. The club will argue that Negreira did not have any capacity to influence arbitration or the designation of the referees, so he could be hired by Barça. "Negreira did not have the capacity to alter the result," Laporta said yesterday before the peñistas. And he added: "We will explain everything." Today is his turn.
