Judge in Negreira case charges Laporta with bribery and other crimes

Judge Joaquín Aguirre decided Wednesday to charge the current president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, as part the Negreira case, which is investigating the payment of 7.3 million euros by FC Barcelona to the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees, José María Enríquez Negreira, and his son for a period of 18 years.

The court attributed the same offences to Laporta as to former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu and two former directors of the club. That is to say, a continuous offence of bribery and, alternatively, sporting corruption, unfair administration and falsification of commercial documents.

In the order, to which EL PERIODICO has had access, the head of the Court of Instruction number 1 of Barcelona extends the condition of defendant not only to Laporta, but to all members of his board of directors between 2008 and 2010 who were integrated in the organisation chart of the club and played "an effective responsibility in making the decision to make the allegedly illicit payments" to Enriquez Negreira and his son, Javier Enriquez Romero.

READ ORDER IN SPANISH IN PDF

The magistrate considers that the payments that Barça made to the former referee during Laporta's first term of office (2003-2010) are criminal and are not time-barred, so they can be investigated. At the time, the prosecutor's office excluded the current FC Barcelona president from its complaint by applying the statute of limitations. However, the judge now recalls that the statute of limitations, being a crime of continuous bribery, is 10 years from the day on which the last criminal offence was carried out, in this case on 17 July 2018, when the club made the last payment to the Enriquez family.

Statutes of limitations

With these calculations, the magistrate believes that the former presidents and certain former directors of Barça should be subject to a 10-year period starting on 17 July 2018, taking into account that the penalty that could be imposed on them for the continuing offence of bribery would be six to seven and a half years in prison. Therefore, the period to be investigated would go back to July 2008, during Laporta's term of office. In the case of Enriquez Negreira and his son, the resolution specifies, the imputable acts would reach June 2003 (for them the statute of limitations would be 15 years), because although the prison sentence is the same, for them, as they are considered public officials, a disqualification of more than 10 years would be included.

The crime

The judge recalls that the crime of bribery punishes the public official who receives money from a private individual for the purpose of carrying out acts that constitute a breach of the duties inherent to the position. And he recalls that in the order that attributed this offence to those under investigation (27 September 2023), he equated Erniquez Negreira to a civil servant. Unlike the offence of corruption in sport, the offence of bribery -- to be tried by a popular court -- does not require proof of consideration for the payments made to the public official.

The disbursements, the magistrate specifies in his new ruling, were to increase from 70,000 euros per year to 700,000 euros per year. Precisely, Barça stopped paying in 2018, when the refereeing official left his position in the Technical Committee of Referees. For this reason, the judge deduces that these payments "produced the arbitration effects desired by FC Barcelona, in such a way that there must have been inequality in the treatment with other teams" in LaLiga and the Copa de Rey, and "the consequent systemic corruption in Spanish arbitration as a whole, which does not mean that each and every one of the referees were corrupt, but a group of them were."

Enriquez Negreira's actions, he specifies, "could refer to biased refereeing appointments or to admonitions made to the normally appointed referees." In the same vein, the judge adds that the purpose of the payments was "spurious" and are an "unlawful act that undermines the purity of sporting competition, using unethical means to obtain privileged data that is not available to other teams or to transmit, through Enriquez Negreira or his son Javier, certain refereeing suggestions".