Barcelona judge Joaquín Aguirre has charged the partner of the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), José María Enríquez Negreira, with money laundering after discovering three million euros in her bank accounts.
The judge indicted the former referee’s wife after the Civil Guard discovered nearly three million euros in his bank accounts that he had deposited between 1992 and 2023 without “apparent justification.” The agents have not yet submitted their final report on the case.
In its preliminary analysis, the Civil Guard stated that the income of the former student’s spouse “is being studied and analyzed” in order to determine its origin, although “a priori, it is apparently unjustified by income and income from work and real estate capital,” according to the researchers. As an example, the Armed Institute cites income from checks on one of the accounts owned by Negreira’s partner.
The Civil Guard must also verify “the origin of checks and cash deposits, as well as review additional documents that may justify the transactions, among others.”
The report estimates the amount that appears in the accounts of Negreira’s partner at 2,977,557.51 euros, at the time when he was number 2 of the referees. The Civil Guard affirms that “there are relevant sums of money whose origin has not been proven”, without being able for the moment to link them to the payments that Barça made to the referee for more than two decades, worth 7.5 million euros.
The Civil Guard doubts that the 7.5 million that Barça paid to Negreira correspond to arbitration reports, as the club maintains, because they were not used by any department of the entity, including the technical staff, although the purpose of the payments is still unknown.
The judge extended the investigation of the case so that the Civil Guard could present its final report. After a year of investigation, Judge Aguirre suffered several setbacks from the Barcelona court, which overturned the corruption charge against the current president of Barça, Joan Laporta, and that of the club.
The case returns to the crimes initially reported by Anti-Corruption – unfair administration, falsification of documents and sports corruption – and that the Barcelona Public Prosecutor’s Office had been dealing with for a long time, which, before the judge, had already carried out an in-depth investigation into the Negreira case. Yes, former presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu are still under investigation.
In the order granting investigator status to Negreira’s wife, Judge Aguirre states that until investigators “present the report of findings,” statements from those investigated, including the former referee’s wife, cannot be obtained.
