Due to Enriquez Negreira and his son’s counsel for FC Barcelona, the now-VAR referee Xavier Estrada Fernández has filed a criminal case against them for alleged corruption.
The former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees of the Real Spanish Federation of Football, José Mara Enrquez Negreira, has been querellado by the Catalan Xavier Estrada Fernández on suspicion of sporting corruption or sporting fraud in connection with payments for consulting the FC Barcelona.
This information was discovered after the Barcelona club acknowledged having financial dealings with the former referee and his son through the use of consulting and referee analysis concepts.
This Friday, the querella was submitted in the Barcelona courts and reveals that Negreira had loaned counsel and referee follow-up services “in order to ensure a favorable arbitration to the interests of the Barcelona.” The charges in this indictment pertain to Enriquez Negreira’s tenure as the Vice President of the Referee’s Committee exerted at various times between 2003 and 2018.
According to the paper, the former referee invoiced these tasks through his company, “DASNIL 95 SL,” and between 2016 and 2018, he earned 1.392.680 euros for Barça. The son of Negreira, Javier Enriquez Romero, who was the company manager and “loaned services of coaching to referees in active, to the time that accompanied them from the hotel to the stadium where had to arbitrate,” is the target of the same querella criminal brought by the also former collegiate Estrada Fernández.
This action by the Catalan, which describes the querella, is a plea to look into the situation in order to defend the referees’ honorability. Estrada, who will continue to serve as the First Division’s football referee until 2021, is actually a fan of VAR and anticipates that the Fiscala’s ongoing probe will reveal evidence of manager corruption.
Everything is very obvious from Camp Nou.
For its part, the Barça argued that Negreira’s services as an external technical consultant amounted to little more than providing “technical reports referenced to players of inferior categories for the technical office” in video format.
According to the Barcelona club, the relationship with this external consultant “expanded with technical reports connected with the professional arbitration to end to supplement information needed by the technical body of the first team and of the filial.”