The investigation by the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office for alleged payments of 1.4 million euros made by FC Barcelona between 2016 and 2018 to a company owned by José María Enríquez Negreira, former referee and number two of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) between 1994 and 2018, it is the last of the multiple court cases that have plagued the Barça club.
In the last twelve years, the entity, former presidents and footballers have been involved in multiple off-sport conflicts that have come to justice. These are some of the most significant cases:
The action of responsibility to the board of Joan Laporta
The facts of this case go back to the departure of Joan Laporta from the first stage as president of FC Barcelona in the summer of 2010, when he presented a positive balance of his seven years in office, with final profits of 11.1 million in The last course.
Sandro Rosell’s victory led the new president to reformulate the accounts for the last year and, instead of the announced benefit, the auditor Deloitte highlighted seven exceptions and some new numbers, with losses of 79.6 million.
In the following assembly, the Rosell board took the vote to the delegates to present a liability action and request that the previous managers cover the losses of the entire mandate, which after the reformulation amounted to 47.6 million euros.
The vote was favorable (468 in favor and 439 against) and Rosell’s board filed a lawsuit against the Laporta executives in court.
In October 2014, the first instance judge José Manuel Martínez Borrego accepted some exceptions, but ruled that the losses of the last campaign were not 79.6, but 26.8 million, an amount that with the rest of the year-ends since the 2003-04 season they had produced total benefits of 4,097,000 euros.
In May 2017, the Barcelona High Court dismissed the appeal filed by FC Barcelona against the sentence handed down by the court of first instance.
The signing of Neymar
Since FC Barcelona partner Jordi Cases filed a lawsuit against Sandro Rosell in 2013, the case for the signing of Neymar had a huge impact and led to the resignation of the Barca president.
In total, two cases were opened. The so-called “Neymar 1” ended in December 2016 when the club accepted the payment of 5.5 million euros for two tax offenses (2011 and 2013).
In 2015, a second lawsuit was filed by DIS, the company that owns 40 percent of the player’s rights, a case known as “Neymar 2”, whose trial was held in October 2022 at the Barcelona Court, hearing in which it withdrew the accusations the prosecutor’s office and the prosecution reduced their requests.
In December 2022, the sentence acquitted the 9 defendants, including the player, his parents and the former presidents Rosell and Bartomeu, considering that there was no fraud.
The acquittal of Sandro Rosell after 22 months in prison
This case did not directly affect the club, but it did affect former president Sandro Rosell, who spent almost two years in pretrial detention while it was investigated whether he laundered 20 million euros from the Brazilian Football Confederation and kept at least 6.5 million. He was acquitted under the principle “in dubio pro reo” (in case of doubt, the ruling is in favor of the accused).
The problems of footballers with the Treasury
In the last decade, many soccer players have been investigated for having articulated corporate structures abroad created to hide from the treasury the income generated in Spain for image rights.
In the case of Barcelona, the list of footballers who in the last decade had problems with the Treasury for this reason is long. The former players of the Barça team Javier Mascherano, Leo Messi, Alexis Sánchez and Adriano Correia ended up sentenced after defrauding, between the four of them, more than 7 million euros and paying more than 5 million in fines.
Adriano, Mascherano and Alexis prevented their time at the Barcelona Court from becoming a show, but not Lionel Messi, now in the ranks of PSG.
In the end, the payment of more than 3.5 million euros in fines, in addition to the return of the defrauded amounts, prevented the Argentine ‘crack’ and his father from going to prison.
The ‘Barçagate’, the end point to Bartomeu’s mandate
‘Barçagate’ was born after the program Què T’hi Jugues’, from ‘SER Catalunya’, the same medium that has uncovered Barcelona’s payments to José María Enríquez Negreira’s company, published in February 2020 that the board de Josep Maria Bartomeu had allegedly hired the services of a company to carry out smear campaigns against people not related to the board.
This journalistic investigation was one of the causes that led to the motion of censure and subsequent resignation of Josep Maria Bartomeu as president of the Barça club in October 2020.
Currently, the examining magistrate number 13 of Barcelona is investigating a possible unfair administration and corruption between individuals by Bartomeu; his right hand, Jaume Masferrer; the former head of legal services, Román Gómez-Ponti; and the former CEO, Óscar Grau.
Gerard Piqué and the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia
In May 2022, El Confidencial published audios and documents that indicated a possible pact between Kosmos and the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) for which Gerard Piqué’s company would have charged a multimillion-dollar commission for the transfer of the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia.
This case is being investigated by a court in Majadahonda (Madrid) for unfair administration and business corruption against the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), Luis Rubiales, and former Barcelona soccer player Gerard Piqué.
The dispute with Laliga for the salary mass
The difficulty in registering footballers due to Barcelona’s breach of the LaLiga ‘Financial Fair Play’ regulations has become one of Joan Laporta’s headaches in his second term as president of the Barça club.
Recently, the Catalan entity has sued LaLiga for preventing it from expanding its salary mass by 15%, as can be done by the 38 clubs that voted in favor of the entry of the CVC Capital Partners fund for the creation of LaLiga Impulso.
In addition, on January 31, Barcelona’s commercial court number 12 demanded that LaLiga allow the Barça club to carry out the necessary procedures to register midfielder Pablo Páez Gavira ‘Gavi’ as a first-team player. A decision that the Spanish football employers will appeal.
