The news uncovered by Cadena Ser about the continued payments by FC Barcelona to a company owned by José María Enríquez Negreira, vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees between 1994 and 2018, continues to undermine the reputation of the Blaugrana club. The trickle of information related to the case does not stop, whether in the form of new revelations, complaints from clubs or even lawsuits like the one filed by referee Xavier Estrada, in his case, against Enríquez Negreira. The questions multiply, but one prevails over the others: how could the payment of seven million euros over 17 seasons, involving several of its presidents, escape the control of a club of the magnitude of Barça?
Although the connections between Enríquez Negreira and Barcelona were born with the presidency of Josep Lluís Núñez, the Prosecutor's Office does not set a date for the first remuneration of the club to the former referee until the arrival of Joan Gaspart as maximum president (2001-2003). Gaspart, benefited by the prescription of the facts, has not denied these days the information, although he has varnished them with endless contradictions. On the one hand he has said that he does not remember, on the other, that nothing illegal was done. There is no documentary evidence of the reason for those transactions since the alleged favors and advice from Enríquez Negreira were carried out orally.
One of the keys to the Negreira case is understanding the transfer of powers between the mandates of Joan Gaspart and Joan Laporta (2003-2010). Hand in hand with the opposition movement Elefant Blau, Laporta based a large part of his speech on the idea of radically breaking with the past represented by both Núñez and his successor Gaspart. “We will dedicate the best years of our lives”, proclaimed a Laporta flanked in 2003, among others, by those who would end up succeeding him after internal battles that have distracted and even drugged the Barcelona masses for years: Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu. Those youngsters would transform Barça, but not before "raising the rugs" inherited to, apparently, discover the hidden filth, the malpractice, the economic scandals, that old and despicable way of running the football business in short...
At the moment of truth, already with Laporta as president in his first year, Gaspart went from enemy to ally. Witnesses of the time remember a revealing meeting between the two at the Avenida Palace hotel in Barcelona. “They were in there for hours. They basically talked about relations with the Federation, which Gaspart knew in depth at that time and which for Laporta were a world to explore”, a source who experienced that up close told La Vanguardia. “They ended up hugging,” he adds. In 2004, Gaspart would be named vice president of international and institutional affairs for the Spanish Federation, an influential position from a Blaugrana perspective. Laporta, for his part, would end up stating the following in an interview when they reproached him for not finally raising any rugs: “Documentation proving any irregularity presumably constituting a crime, well zero, not one. There is nothing reportable. It is very easy to demagogy with this, but the president of Barça cannot act recklessly”.
And Enriquez Negreira? Well, under that first term of Laporta, fabulously. He increased his emoluments considerably without Barcelona, apart from some recent statements by Laporta precisely that affirm the contrary, having provided documentation that at least did something to deserve the payment of millions of euros. The complicity between both parties was not a secret either. It was not strange to see Enríquez Negreira in the Camp Nou box.
The arrival of Sandro Rosell to the presidency (2010-14) waving the flag of austerity and pointing out the board that preceded him as wasteful until he denounced it through a liability action did not lead to the detection of payments to Enríquez Negreira as something irregular or suspicious. The inflexible economic team, so strict that it was caricatured for not allowing color photocopies to be made to save money, considered payments of hundreds of thousands of euros a year to the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees acceptable.
With Josep Maria Bartomeu (2014-20) the rates were also maintained, although with a notable novelty: the incorporation into Dasnil 95, the collection company of Enríquez Negreira, of his son Javier, as well as the production of videos and reports (arbitral or on players of lower categories) for an alleged order from the club. "We received an envelope every week at the Camp Nou offices and from there we sent it to the sports city of Sant Joan Despí," an executive at the time told this newspaper. “It was routine,” he adds. All these reports were delivered to the Prosecutor's Office by Javier Enríquez Romero when they were claimed. Enríquez Romero moved around the club like Pedro around his house. In the sports city, accompanying referee delegations, in the vicinity of the first team locker room... It was part of the landscape.
In 2014, the director Josep Contreras, now deceased, also burst onto the scene, at the head of the Tresep company. The Prosecutor's Office is investigating the payment of commissions to that company of up to 50 percent of what Enríquez Júnior billed for the reports he prepared.
Even then, no one in the club considered acting? "Yes, the accounts were audited, but all this type of expense was camouflaged under advisory expenses," explains a Bartomeu manager. The phrase actually portrays the chilling carelessness with which the respective directives treated the money they had to manage. A money that, obviously, was not his, but the partners.
