Thebes: “The ‘Negreira case’ looks bad and UEFA must intervene”

“I want the ‘Negreira case’, which looks bad, to be clarified and decisions to be made, because there is irregular and non-logical behavior and the intention has to be known,” the president of LaLiga, Javier Tebas, claimed this Wednesday, referring to to payments from Barcelona to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) from 2001 to 2018.

The day after a complaint by the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office was announced against the Barça club, Josep Maria Bartomeu and José María Enríquez Negreira himself for continued corruption in business, which includes fraud in the sports field, Tebas revealed that it was LaLiga the one that “48 hours after the case was uncovered (on February 15) reported the matter to UEFA.” “Other institutions did not,” he lamented.

“We could not intervene because it was prescribed (the presumed crimes prescribe three years after the events occurred, according to the Sports Law), but we consider that the UEFA Ethics Committee should intervene,” proclaimed Tebas, who recalled that the maximum European body “has already requested information from the Spanish Football Federation (FEF)” and “the pertinent decisions must be made when the investigation is finished.”