Barcelona president Joan Laporta is the latest figure to face bribery charges in connection with suspected payments to a refereeing official.
Barcelona is being investigated for “active bribery” in connection with alleged payments to former refereeing vice-president Enriquez Negreira.
The club is reported to have begun paying Negreira between 2001 and 2007, although the statute of limitations on those alleged offenses has expired.
So far, the Camp Nou team have been under investigation for a total of 33 payments totalling €1.6 million made to a company owned by Negreira between 2016 and 2018.
However, the investigation may be extended to 2008, around the time of Laporta’s first term as Barcelona president.
Laporta has now been implicated in the scandal alongside former Barca presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, as well as former directors Oscar Grau and Albert Soler.
Judge Joaquin Aguirre has stated that there were “more than ample indications that Laporta committed the same acts as subsequent presidents,” amounting to paying “large amounts of money” to Negreira.
The statute of limitations for such cases ends at the time of the last payment made, which would be in the summer of 2018, according to El Mundo.
As vice president for the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), Negreira is considered a public official and so the statute of limitations for the crime of continued bribery is 15 years. Thus, he and his son face punishment for cases that stretch back to 2003.
However, for Laporta and his fellow Barcelona officials, the period they can be punished for is just 10 years, meaning the investigation can look into incidents beginning from 2008 until that last alleged payment in 2018.
“It is proven that the payments were made over about 18 years and that they increased year after year,” the judge said. “It is proven that Enriquez Negreira stopped receiving emoluments from FC Barcelona once he ceased his position as vice president of the CTA in 2018.
“It is proven that the investigated Enriquez Negreira sent a burofax (business communication) to FC Barcelona referring to the dissemination of possible irregularities of which he was aware and that would seriously affect FC Barcelona.”
The payments are said to have increased from the initial €70,000 euros to €700,000 annually for 18 years until Negreira resigned from the CTA, and the judge has alleged that the club would have gained preferential treatment from officials.
He added: “By logical deduction, the payments made by FC Barcelona satisfied the interests of the club in view of their duration and the annual increase. From here it is also deduced that the 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 and the consequent systemic corruption in the Spanish arbitration as a whole, which does not mean that each and every one of the referees were corrupt, but it did mean that a group of them.”
