El Mundo] Joan Laporta is charged with bribing the former vice-president of referees. The judge considers that the bribery investigation should be extended to the first presidency of the Barça leader.
Barcelona's Court of Instruction number 1 has indicted FC Barcelona president Joan Laporta on charges of bribery. In this way, he has been implicated in the so-called 'Negreira case' along with the former presidents of the club Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, the former directors Oscar Grau and Albert Soler, as well as the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees José María Enríquez Negreira and his son Javier.
A week ago, judge Joaquín Aguirre made it clear that there was "more than enough evidence that Laporta committed the same acts as the subsequent presidents. These facts consist of FC Barcelona having paid large sums of money to José María Enríquez Negreira because he was one of the vice-presidents of the Technical Committee of Referees of the Royal Spanish Football Federation".
For this reason, he criticised Laporta for urging the club's legal services to be a prosecutor in these proceedings because "it is unethical that someone who committed acts identical to those of subsequent presidents should try to appear in the case as a private prosecutor under the legal instrument of FC Barcelona, as if it were an abstract entity with an 'I' of its own that is alien to that of the club's directors".
https://www.elmundo.es/deportes/2023/10/18/652f79fefdddffbb0a8b4587.html