Barcelona President Joan Laporta has defended the club in the face of their anti-corruption investigation being carried out by the public prosecutor in Spain. He was denied any wrongdoing on Barcelona’s part.
Laporta started off his press conference with a 35-minute speech on the Negreira case, what he called a campaign to destabilise the club and control them. He also name-dropped La Liga President Javier Tebas as part of that campaign, while calling out Real Madrid as a ‘historically favoured’ organisation.
“Barcelona have never undertaken any operation with any intention or objective to influence the sporting outcome.”
“The Public Prosecutor has been unable to demonstrate this at any point,” Laporta began.
“Barcelona have contracted out technical and refereeing consultancy, which in of itself is not an issue.”
“This is something many big clubs do and is important.”
“We made these payments with invoices, bank payments and for specific activities.”
Laporta did seem to hint that he felt Barcelona could have been the victim of financial crimes, rather than the perpetrator of sporting offences.
“We did this with transparency. Another question would be whether, once the investigation has finished, whether certain people or private entities, not the club, have benefitted individually from these assessments. In that case, Barcelona would be the victim.”
He went on to reveal the results of a preliminary investigation carried out by an external firm.
“This is no evidence of bribery or of attempts to influence sporting outcomes.”
“There is evidence of the services of the technical refereeing consultancy. Here are the reports – 629 of them (2014-18), that have been found by compliance,” he highlighted with the documents in hand.
Laporta maintained that most of their dealings were with Negreira’s son, Javier Enriquez Romero. He remained steadfast and repeated on a number of occasions that Barcelona has not committed any crimes of corruption, nor had they tried to influence referees.
The fact he refused to acknowledge that it was an ethical conflict to be paying the Vice-President of the Referees Committee will be questioned by many, even if he did admit that nowadays he would have passed the issue onto compliance.