La Liga leaders Barcelona are currently being investigated by prosecutors in Spain for allegedly paying $1.5 million to former referee official Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira for a period exceeding three years.
Negreira was the Vice President of a refereeing committee of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, the governing body of football in Spain.
Barcelona have confirmed these investigations, after Spanish Radio Cadena SER reported the proceedings at the club on Wednesday morning.
The club released a statement regarding the
matter in which they defended the payments, saying that they were for external consultation services where Negreira’s company provided the club with technical reports, some of them in
video, related to professional refereeing.
The club asserts that this is practiced by a host of other professional football clubs around the world. Other services the hired consultant supplied to Barcelona are scouting reports about youth players from other Spanish clubs. It is common knowledge that Barcelona boasts of one of the most prolific football academies in the world in La Masia.
Although the investigations are specifically focusing on the payments in three years, former Barcelona President Josep Maria Bartomeu said that the club started making such payments in 2003 until 2018 when the club started cutting its expenditure. That’s according to Spanish sports magazine Mundo Deportivo.
Another statement regarding the investigations has been released by the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) in Spain that Negreira’s official duties with the committee stopped in 2008 so there is likely no conflict of interest that would otherwise suggest Barcelona ever got any refereeing favours as a result of doing business with Negreira.
