My understanding of it:
Enriquez Negreira was a famous/controversial/colorful ref in the La Liga during 1975-91. After his active career, he became the VP of La Liga’s referee organ (CTA). Especially fairly early, there started to be talk about how Negreira appointed refs that favored Barca, plenty of old articles and even TV debate about it has come to light. Reading up on him, Neigreira comes across as a hustler. He was kicked out of the Catalan Referee Organization due to accusations of embezzlement etc.
A couple of years ago, the Tax Authorities started to investigate payments to Negreira’s company. Eventually it was discovered that the payments totaled no less than €7,000,000. Negreira could not produce any agreement for the payments nor produce any proof of any services provided. Negreira himself claimed that the payments had been made for him assuring that Barca got “neutral” treatments during 18 years when he was VP of the CTA.
Barca was contacted about the payments, and at first nobody seemed to have a clue what it was about, but eventually it was discovered that the 7m had been paid to through the same payment method used when they bribed journalists and socials media people to smear existing Barca players to get them to accept to leave the club even if it meant a pay cut as well as for smear campaigns against rivals to the club presidents in elections (this is the BarcaGate that made so much noise a couple of years ago and which led to many criminal charges). Some emails have leaked from internal Barca communications, discussing the topic “so do we play dumb or admit that we didn’t have a contract?”
When Neigreira retired from the CTA, Barca immediately terminated the services of his company. This really pissed of Negreira — this guy is obviously a real character — who started spamming the Barca president with faxes (haha, and this is just a few years ago), saying stuff like ‘if you don’t pay me, I will go public with all irregularities that I know of’, and stuff like that. Everything has become public.
There have been some lame statements, Barca claiming that everyone does it (which is false, nobody else have engaged an acting referee or official as consultant), today Barca have an ex ref who they pay 25k a year, Neigreda got 570k one season. Thebes — the La Liga president who seem desperate to save Barca — came up with the extremely dumb excuse that Neigreira had conned Barca, they thought they bribed him but it didn’t matter because he had no power. This seems to be Barcas best defense, sure we bribed the **** out of the CTA, but we are the victim since we were conned. OK. An attempt to bribe a ref is extremely bad, to have done it for 18 years is as bad as it gets.
