The judge in the Negreira case, Joaquín Aguirre, suspects that there was "systemic corruption" in the Technical Committee of Referees and wants to clarify whether Barça's payments to the vice president of the CTA, José María Enríquez Negreira, served to benefit the Barça team. This is what the judge points out, but as a line of investigation - and not as a proven fact - in an order in which he ratifies the legitimacy of Real Madrid to appear in the case as a private prosecution as an alleged injured party. In the letter, the magistrate marks the line of investigation that must be followed and suggests some hypotheses for which there is still no evidence.
The magistrate clarifies that "there are no indications of a traditional payment method for a specific match" but calls on the Civil Guard to investigate whether the process of appointing the referees for each match or their promotion or demotion was perverted by Enríquez himself negreira. In this way, it orders to investigate "if a referee qualification system was established within the CTA, supervised by Negreira, which could allow referees related to him to direct relevant matches of the League or Cup and international matches or even maintain the category , thus increasing their income in a very important way”. This would be a "possible illegitimate retribution to soccer referees." And even when this last point is not proven", the judge points out, it must be studied whether the annual payment to the former vice president of the CTA "is in itself a crime, although the payment by Negreira to specific arbitrators to alter the result of certain matches".
According to the judge, Barça paid between 2001 and 2018 between 70,000 and 700,000 euros annually to Negreira, "one of the three vice presidents of the body that appoints the referees each day and that decides promotions and relegations and internationals (of the referees). ", so in this case it will have to be decided whether this constitutes a crime, what crime and for what purpose the payments were made.
In this sense, the magistrate returns to throw another suspicion. "It is presumed by pure logic that FC Barcelona would not pay Vice President Negreira around 7 million euros since 2001 if it did not benefit him." For this reason, he considers that any First Division team that has coincided with FC Barcelona during the years under investigation must be admitted as offended and participate in the judicial investigation.
The magistrate takes as reference some news published by the media in which several referees, some retired, have stated that the CTA used "a corrective index (which the media called corrupting in mockery) to determine the internal category of each referee with the economic consequences that this entailed for the referees. They say that the operation of the corrective index did not follow known criteria, but that the referees suspected that there was a discrepancy between the level of each referee and their classification in the CTA. Therefore, The judge asks the Civil Guard to also investigate this point.
The Negreria case was uncovered by the broadcaster SER Catalunya when it realized that FC Barcelona had paid 7.3 million euros to the vice president of the referees from 2001 to 2018. Negreira himself was required by the Treasury for an inspection and justified that the payments "What he received from the club was to ensure that no decisions were made against Barça and that everything was neutral." In another order of things, the judge has decided to separate the investigations. On the one hand, he will investigate whether there was a purchase of referees by Barça and in a separate piece he will investigate whether that money was laundered by the Negreiras.
