Former Barcelona chief Josep Maria Bartomeu has confirmed to ESPN that ex-Spanish refereeing committee (CTA) vice president Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira tried to extort money from the Catalan club in 2018 after it stopped making payments to his company.
Enriquez Negreira is being investigated by the Spanish prosecutor’s office for receiving at least €1.6 million from Barca between 2016 and 2018 for consultancy work.
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Barca stopped making payments to Enriquez Negreira’s part-owned company DASNIL 95 SL after June 2018 once Negreira was no longer vice president of the CTA.
Enriquez Negreira sent a registered letter to Bartomeu, published in El Mundo newspaper, in which he threatened to reveal alleged irregularities of the club unless their partnership resumed.
“When we cut off the relationship, after a few days, I received Enriquez Negreira’s burofax, of which despite the threats, we never heard from him again,” Bartomeu told ESPN.
“He sent us the letter in mid-2018 and until today, I always thought that this a useless document, that no matter how much he scratched, he would never get anything out [of it].”
Bartomeu confirmed that Barcelona contracted Enriquez Negreira’s company, among other things, was for “technical reports related to professional refereeing” and that such practice was commonplace in football.
There have been accusations that Barca gained advantages on the pitch, yet Bartomeu insisted that was not the case.
“Barcelona has nothing to hide and it’s impossible to say that Barcelona rigged any match,” he said. “Saying that is outrageous. Barca have won all the titles in recent years because they have been better than the rest of their rivals.
“If they want to search, let them search, they will find nothing. And remember that in 2014, for example, a refereeing error cost us a league title at home against Atlético. We never said anything.”
Asked what work Enriquez Negreira’s company carried out for Barca, Bartomeu said: “He made two types of reports: a pre-game one, in which he indicated what the referee was like and how he behaved, and a post-game one in which he analysed the work that the referee had done, where he had failed and where he had got it right.”
Bartomeu said the Enriquez Negreira case cannot be compared to the Calciopoli scandal that rocked Italy in 2006 and led to Juventus being relegated to Serie B with two of their titles being revoked.
“It’s perverse to compare this to the Moggigate [Calciopoli], crazy,” Bartomeu said. “Barca is clean of everything, I insist, clean of everything and very calm. This is a practice carried out by all clubs.
“Everyone has control over the refereeing work. And it’s normal. The clubs complain publicly and privately about decisions that they consider may have harmed them and go to the federation with documentation and videos as a result of the work on these reports.”
Bartomeu said their collaboration ended with Enriquez Negreira in 2018 because Barca decided to do their work themselves to save money.
On Thursday, LaLiga president Javier Tebas said the club will not face sporting sanctions over the conflict of interest accusations because statute of limitations laws in Spain make it possible to punish clubs only within three years of any offences.
Enriquez Negreira was a top-flight referee in Spain between 1977 and 1992.
He was later the vice president of the referee’s committee until 2018, when he left the role following elections.
The current president of the referees committee, Luis Medina Cantalejo, said he believed in the integrity of the league referees.
“We will trust that the courts will act and leave it in their hands and that if anyone is responsible that they pay the highest punishment,” he said.
According to El Mundo, Barca paid a total of €6.65m without tax to Enriquez Negreira’s company, with payments dating to 2001 when Joan Gaspart was club president.
The club presidents who succeeded Gaspart reportedly continued those payments and even increased the amount. Those club presidents: Enric Reyna, Joan Laporta (twice), Sandro Rosell, Josep Maria Bartomeu and Carles Tusquets.
According to El Pais, the payments by Barcelona to Enriquez Negreira reached €7m and started back in 2001. If so, that would mean Barcelona kept paying Enriquez Negreira during different club presidents, including from 2003-10 under the first term of current president Joan Laporta, who again took charge in 2021.
“I shut off the faucet on Negreira, Laporta quadrupled his salary, he should explain that,” he said in reference to Laporta’s first tenure as president.
El Mundo reported that Enriquez Negreira had threatened Bartomeu to create a “scandal” when the club decided to stop paying for his company’s services in 2018.
In an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC on Friday, Bartomeu said he ended the contract with the company to reduce costs and that the club never tried to seek favor from referees. He added that in exchange for the money the club received referee reports “in written form and in DVD” for every game for its first team and its “B” team.
“It looks like with this service we were asking for more penalties in our favor or that we wanted to condition the referees’ decision, but it is not true. This person [Enriquez Negreira] had zero power of the referees,” Bartomeu said.
Gaspart, who ran Barcelona from 2000-2003 when the payments allegedly started, has denied any knowledge of them.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.