In a new setback for Spain’s scandal-plagued football association, police on Thursday raided the country’s football officiating headquarters as part of an investigation into claims FC Barcelona paid for favorable outcomes.
The court looking into the so-called Negreira case, which involves payments allegedly made to a company owned by a former senior officiating official named Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, ordered the search.
Police started their investigation early on Thursday at the CTA Referees Technical Committee offices, which are located at the headquarters of the RFEF Football Federation outside of Madrid.
According to a statement, a judge in Barcelona had authorized the search “as part of the investigation into the suspect payments made by the Catalan club” to Negreira.
Authorities believe that between 2001 and 2018, Barca paid Dasnil 95, a business owned by Negreira, millions of euros in an effort to influence corrupt officials to make favorable refereeing decisions.
The club acknowledged paying Dasnil, but said the firm was compensated to give it refereeing advice. All wrongdoing is denied.
Joaquin Aguirre, a magistrate, also declared on Thursday that he will look into the club and a number of its past directors for possible bribery.
Barcelona’s payment of “one of the CTA’s three vice presidents through intermediary companies” is undeniable, the court stated in his ruling.
The payments, which lasted roughly 18 years, increased rapidly “from an initial 70,000 euros a year to 700,000 euros” and ceased when Negreira left his post in 2018, he said.
Given their tenure and yearly growth, Aguirre asserted that FC Barcelona’s payments “stand to reason” that they suited the club’s interests.
“The payments led to refereeing decisions sought by FC Barcelona in a manner that must have involved unfair treatment of other teams and, as a result, systemic corruption throughout Spanish refereeing as a whole,” the report stated.
According to him, police detectives were looking into the extent of the corruption.
- “Illegal acts favoring Barca” – Prosecutors launched a corruption inquiry into the matter in March, accusing FC Barcelona as well as four other people, including Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell, Negreira, and his son Javier Enriquez.
They assert that between 1994 and 2018, Negreira, a vice president at the CTA, received more than 7.3 million euros from Barca.
Following a reorganization at the RFEF, the payments ceased when Negreira departed the CTA.
Negreira threatened to divulge information that would “seriously harm the club” if payment wasn’t made in a letter to Bartomeu, Barca’s president at the time, after the money stopped coming in.
The letter made it evident, according to the judge, that Negreira “was aware that there had been illegal acts that had been quite serious and had favored FC Barcelona.”
When Spain’s tax authorities discovered anomalies in payments made by Dasnil 95 between 2016 and 2018, the inquiry got under way in the spring of 2022.
The raid occurs as Spain’s football association struggles to control a problem brought on by the scandal surrounding the World Cup kiss, in which its now-disgraced former president Luis Rubiales forcedly kissed midfielder Jenni Hermoso.
