The information published by the newspaper ‘El Mundo’ about the ‘Enríquez Negreira case’ and that it will open its sports section in this Tuesday’s edition is very significant and refers to private conversations held with the former presidents of FC Barcelona, Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosellin reference to the payments made to the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees.
“We paid in self-defense”, say the ex-presidents and ex-directors of FC Barcelona investigated in the ‘Negreira case’. They were convinced, according to the information, that there was a tendency to favor Real Madrid in the refereeing establishment.
They also assure that they hid these payments from their directors and a large part of their executives with the purpose of “protecting them” and that if they did not break up with José María Enríquez Negreira earlier, it was because they maintained permanent blackmail over the club with false accusations and they did not want that to happen. lead to a major public scandal, according to the publication.
These confidences would coincide in private with those made before the Tax Agency by the former collegiate, in the sense that Barça wanted to guarantee “neutrality” in arbitrations.
“These payments have been made by other teams”
The information also refers to a meeting in 2004 between Joan Laporta, who had been president for a year, and Joan Gaspart, his predecessor in office, at the Avenida Palace hotel in Barcelona. “They were talking for hours and talked about the need not to lose weight in the Federation, in which Negreira was vice president of the CTA. That same year, in 2004, Gaspart was appointed vice president of institutional and international affairs of the Federation”remember ‘The World’.
From the environment of the former presidents, it is also insisted that payments such as those made to Negreira “have been carried out by other First and Second teams.” And they complain that they are only acting against the Barcelona entity when it is a widespread behavior in Spanish football.
