The former referee José María Enríquez Negreira received around seven million euros from FC Barcelona for alleged "verbal advice" of which there is no trace.

He didn't think it was enough.

In July 2018, when Barça closed the tap and decided to do without his supposed services, he reacted angrily.

In a letter sent to the then president Josep Maria Bartomeu, to which EL PAÍS has accessed, his lawyer demanded immediate payment of the 267,000 euros that, according to his criteria, were pending for the remaining months of the year.

Enríquez Negreira's anger was reflected in the form of a burofax in January 2019. Dasnil, the company with which he billed the club, had not taken the allusion when, in July, Barça informed him that they were no longer going to continue paying him.

“They tell me that this season we will not need your services and therefore we should not receive any bills,” the finance department wrote to a Dasnil worker.

In the burofax, the lawyer considers that these "comments", addressed to a "secretary" of Enríquez Negreira, were not enough.

"That rumor of something that is being talked about, but it is not firm or definitive, it is far from being understood as a formal communication."

The letter adds that the Barça president had expressed his reservations:

In the previous two seasons, Dasnil had made over half a million each year.

In 2018, on the other hand, the amount that appears in the company's accounts —analyzed by the Tax Agency, which detected irregularities in the invoices throughout that period— is 318,200 euros because it only reaches up to the month of July.

In the letter, the lawyer demands the payment of the pending amount to a certain account: "We reiterate the need for them to satisfy the amount owed of 267,047 euros."

That first letter already contains a veiled threat: if Barça does not pay, Enríquez Negreira will feel "released from any duty of fidelity and/or confidentiality in relation to FC Barcelona as well as to all the presidents with whom he has dealt, in especially Mr. Bartomeu”.

The letter invited the club to "an exercise in healthy criticism and reflection" and to pay what, in his opinion, it owed.

FC Barcelona responded by saying that the commercial relationship had "been without effect" since July, which gave rise to a second burofax, signed this time by the former collegiate himself, in which the warnings became more evident.

The text, advanced yesterday by

, threatens to publicize alleged irregularities that Enríquez Negreira would have known about over the years of contact with the club.

"I don't think another scandal will help the club."

cash out

The seven million left Barça without a justified reason and without a known destination, according to the case opened by the Prosecutor's Office on the club's payments to Enríquez Negreira.

The investigation concludes that there is no indication that the Dasnil company, owned by the former referee, has effectively provided "verbal advice" to the club since at least 2001. Barça has provided the prosecutor in the case with the invoices issued to that company, but has not You have attached no documentation proving the reality of the work, if it was carried out.

At least since the presidency of Joan Gaspart, the different Barça boards of directors have allocated budget items that, on average, exceed 380,000 euros per year, although the cost of this alleged service increased in the 2009-2010 season, with Joan Laporta as president.

After discovering payments of 1.4 million between 2016 and 2018 due to an inspection by the Tax Agency of Dasnil, the investigation has tried to clear up the mystery: Why did the club allocate such sums of money to consultancies?

According to Enríquez Negreira's statement before the Treasury, Barça wanted to ensure "neutral" arbitrations, which would not harm them.

The investigation, however, has not allowed progress in this line, since the former referee himself remained silent in his appearance as an investigated before the Prosecutor's Office.

Barça did provide a copy of the reports and DVD on referees prepared by the former manager's son, Javier Enríquez, who studied the behavior of referees on the pitch and made the material available to the club.

These payments, however, are different from those received by Enríquez Negreira and, as they have documentary support, in principle they have no criminal relevance, according to sources in the case.

The other great unknown that has not been cleared up is what Enríquez Negreira did with that money.

The Tax Agency has not proven that the generous invoices have led to an increase in his movable assets (boats, luxury cars) or real estate.

The investigation, which began in May 2022, has tracked Enríquez Negreira's checking accounts to see if transfers to accounts of other companies or individuals had been registered.

The result was negative.

What could be verified is that a good part of the money brought in by Dasnil —Barça was practically the company's only source of income— was withdrawn by Enríquez Negreira himself and other people he trusted in cash.

As the facts go back to past times and, in any case,

Bartomeu denied "favourable treatment"

There are no indications, at least for now, that allow us to affirm that the money has been used, for example, to deliver it to certain referees so that they were favorable to Barça in the matches.

In his statement as being investigated before the Prosecutor's Office, Bartomeu denied that the club had received "favorable treatment" from the referees.

And he gave the last league game of the 2013/14 season as an example, in which Barça played for the title against Atlético de Madrid and the referee canceled a goal by Messi that could have been decisive.

"If I ever had a refereeing problem, I always talked about it with [Ángel María] Villar or with [Luis] Rubiales [former president and president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation] and if necessary I would go with a video of the controversial plays" adds Bartomeu in conversation with this newspaper.

Javier Enríquez.

He replied that once the club took over those services, he saved money.

It was Bartomeu's board that broke relations with Dasnil in July 2018. According to the former president's version, the sports management proposed it to save costs and communicated it to the company.

After a few days, Enríquez Negreira called Bartomeu: "He told me that he was very angry and that what we had done seemed very bad to him," Bartomeu explains in a telephone conversation.

It was then, always according to his version, that he realized that Javier Enríquez, the man who sent weekly reports about the referees to the club, was the son of the former referee leader.

"I was very convinced that the one we had hired was the son," he says.

Bartomeu assures that he knew Enríquez Negreira from his visits to the headquarters of the Spanish Federation.

"He never told me that his son worked for us and he never asked me or we had a meeting."

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