Barça-gate: “All Negreira did was spend and spend. He lived like a king”

Spanish daily newspaper El País has spoken to the two people who, according to the investigation carried out into the ‘Barça-gate scandal’, cashed the most checks with which Barcelona used to pay José María Enríquez Negreira, the former vice-president of the Spanish Soccer Federation’s referees’ committee. One is a friend of the former match official (referred to as Antoni by El País in order to preserve anonymity), while the other is C.D., his secretary. The conversation reveals their surprise at the amount of money made by Negreira’s company, which sold gift ideas.

Checks cashed were “always under €3,000″

“My main question was how he was doing so well with a gift company that sold pens to companies. He never told me that he was being paid by Barça, nor did I ask him,” says Antoni. “He asked me to go and cash checks at the bank, which I did for three years. I did it about 50 times, sometimes every two or three days. The amount was always under €3,000 euros. I always remember the figure €2,850 because it was repeated a lot,” he recalls. Between 2016 and 2018 (the period investigated by the Spanish Tax Agency), Barcelona paid the referees’ vice-president €1.4 million to allegedly give them verbal advice which, according to the public prosecutor, was offered to help them gain some form of advantage from referees. There appears to be no documented proof of exactly what advice was given. Almost a third (€500,000) of the total figure paid in the above period was withdrawn in cash.

“The best restaurants and the best cars”

Those constant cash withdrawals alerted the authorities, although for the moment, it has not been possible for them to track the trail of money and prove that it was used to pay any third parties or, as Negreira claims, he was the only beneficiary. “All he did in his life was spend and spend. He liked the best restaurants, the best cars... I would say he burned through the seven million,” says Antoni. As for the services provided to Barcelona, Antoni believes that “he was like a snake oil salesman with Barça and he was living like a king”.

Negreira’s secretary, meanwhile says that she did not know where the money came from, but that she never saw her boss working on reports for Barcelona, nor did she send any documents to the club, beyond the invoices. C.D. believes that the only reason the club stopped paying Negreira is that he “left his position as vice-president” of the Technical Committee of Referees. She also reveals that when that happened, Negreira called former Barça president Josep María Bartomeu in front of her, but he “never answered the calls.”