A recent revelation made by Libertad Digital has put forward a critical piece of evidence that supports Barcelona’s claim that the team only hired Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira’s services to get technical reports on referees.
The outlet discovered a couple of documents some two to three pages long, for which Negreira earned €430,000 per year on average, and this involves referee Ignacio Iglesias Villanueva, who currently acts as a VAR official.
The documents revealed by Libertad Digital have an epigraph in the header with the text “Confidential arbitration report”. Interestingly enough, these documents have the FC Barcelona letterhead and these were seized during a house search of former Barcelona board of director Josep Contreras, who died last December.
Contreras was part of the Barcelona board during the presidential stages of Josep Lluis Nunez, Joan Gaspart and Josep Maria Bartomeu. Investigators have revealed that Contreras charged commissions upto 50 percent of the amount that Barcelona paid for the services of Dansil 95, a company managed by Negreira.
Meanwhile, the documents received by the aforementioned outlet contain a report on Ignacio Iglesias Villanueva from 2012. The occasion was Barcelona’s away game against Mallorca and the report was created during the presidency of Sandro Rosell, who allegedly paid Negreira €2 million between January 2011 and January 2014.
Apart from the Mallorca game, there is also a brief report on the Barcelona-Racing Santander (22-1-2011) match and the Copa del Rey tie against Ceuta (10-11-2010).
The two-page report on Villanueva has data on his referring decisions. Three of the four matches he refereed for Barça ended in wins for the team. Basically, the report had a detailed profile of Villanueva.
One must remember that Barcelona are accused of paying Enriquez Negreira €7.3 million between 2001 and 2018. The prosecutor’s office accuses Barcelona that its true objective was to carry out “actions tending to favour FCB in the decision-making of the referees.”
Amidst all this, the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Barcelona has charged former presidents Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell, and former directors Albert Soler and Oscar Grau with corruption.
