The Barcelona Court has dealt a setback to Judge Joaquín Aguirre’s investigation into the million-dollar payments from FC Barcelona to former arbitration vice president José María Enríquez Negreira. The court has overturned the accusation of a crime of bribery that weighed on the Barça club and also on the rest of those investigated, including three former presidents (Sandro Rosell, Josep Maria Bartomeu and Joan Laporta) and various directors, who will nevertheless continue to be investigated for a crime of corruption in sports.
In September 2023, the investigating judge attributed a new crime, that of bribery, to all those investigated in the Negreira case: bribery. Aguirre argued that the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) exercises functions of a public nature and that Negreira, as vice president of the Technical Arbitration Committee, should be considered a public official. During his time as number two of the Spanish referees (between 1993 and 2018), Negreira received more than seven million euros from Barça for unknown reasons. Without the club being able to give a reasonable explanation, one of the hypotheses of the investigation (unproven to date) is that the payments served to rig the competitions (the League and the Cup) in favor of the Barça club.
The defenses of those investigated categorically opposed the judge’s thesis. And they obtained the support of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which also rejected the accusation of bribery on the grounds that at no time did Negreira work as an official. The fact that “some of the tasks” of the RFEF have a public dimension “does not simply make it an administration” of that nature.
Section 21 of the Barcelona Court has accepted these appeals and has revoked the order that attributed the crime of bribery to those investigated. The magistrates recall that federations are, according to the Sports Law, “private entities of an associative nature.” Although they have two types of powers (own and delegated), in no case do they lose “their intrinsic nature,” which is private. The magistrates thoroughly analyze the jurisprudence on the figure of the public official and conclude that Negreira was not one. Not only was he never appointed by a “competent authority,” but the functions he carried out “cannot be classified as being of general interest, no matter how much interest they may have for football fans.”
The judge’s “contradiction”
The magistrates reproach that Aguirre “incurred a certain contradiction” in his order of September 2023, since he charged a crime of bribery, but at the same time maintained an alternative qualification (for corruption in sport) in the event that his main thesis was discarded. “The entire rationale of the resolution is exclusively and apparently exclusive oriented toward justifying Negreira’s status as a public official.”
Despite annulling the bribery charge and despite criticism of the judge, the court keeps the case open for corruption in sports. He Negreira caseIn fact, it has its origin in a complaint by the Prosecutor’s Office for this crime, which punishes the “directors, administrators, employees or collaborators” of a sports entity, but also the “athletes, referees or judges” who want to “alter deliberately and fraudulently” the result of a competition. Both Barça and the former presidents and directors of the club and the Negreiras (José María Enríquez Negreira and his son, Javier Enríquez) maintain their status as being investigated. In the same resolution, the magistrates have rejected the request of former president Sandro Rosell that the case against him be closed due to the statute of limitations of the crime.
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