Spanish football is facing a major scandal, in which Barcelona intends to go from guilty to victim. While the head of UEFA, Aleksandar Ceferin, considered that the so-called “Negreira Case” that complicates the Catalan entity is “extremely serious”, the club launched a counterattack in which it demands the resignation of the president of LaLiga, Javier Tebas, for having mistakenly involved two former presidents, Josep María Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell.
According to information published by the newspaper La Vanguardia, Tebas sent a letter to the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office in the case about the payments by the Barça club to the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees, José María Enríquez Negreira, in which he wrongly implicated to Bartomeu and Rossell. For this reason, he issued a statement demanding the resignation of the controversial leader.
“The news that La Vanguardia publishes today is so serious that it should alert all LaLiga clubs, due to practices that do not fit in with the functions that are attributed to the president of LaLiga,” said Barcelona, which explained that the Thebes’ action generates “deep anger, indignation and weariness”.
“Only for this fact, that of attributing functions that do not correspond to him, although also out of dignity and respect for the presidency of LaLiga, Mr. Tebas should resign from his function,” Barcelona demanded, which also “urgently” required the president of LaLiga to offer explanations, beyond the message published this Monday on Twitter in which, according to the statement from the Barça entity, he flees from the study and “has a threatening patina”, since in the message the leader urges the president of the Group Godó, owner of the medium where the publication appeared, to monitor his journalists more.
In the message published on his social networks, the top leader of LaLiga called the headline of La Vanguardia “false”, since, as he pointed out, “the news itself corroborates it by pointing out what the letter to the prosecution said: ‘neither the This document supposes the exercise of a specific accusation against anyone'”.
However, Barcelona maintains in its statement that Tebas usually attacks the interests of the club. “It is not the first time that the president of LaLiga has used all his media machinery to blow up the club. Apart from his usual nonsense, we could never have imagined that he would have tried to incriminate our club with false evidence,” said the Catalan club, which He also sought to defend himself against the alleged media attacks that he claims to have suffered since the “Negreira Case” broke out.
“Barça has never bought referees,” insists Barcelona in the statement, a statement that the president of the entity, Joan Laporta, has repeated in his last public appearances. “A handful of media and opinion-makers have participated in this harassment with more or less bad intentions, and with LaLiga behind the scenes fanning the fire against our club, with contributions from its president that have only gone in one direction: trying to condemn us before public opinion before the facts are judged”, denounced Barça.
The “Negreira Case” is being investigated by the Court of Instruction number 1 of Barcelona, which on March 15 admitted the complaint of the Prosecutor’s Office against the Barcelona entity for the millionaire payments to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees that could constitute various corruption offences.