Barca boss denies wrongdoing in referees bribery scandal

 Barcelona pres­ident, Joan Laporta, has once again denied any wrongdoing after it was revealed that he is being investigated for bribing ref­erees in relation to payments made to a former vice-pres­ident of Spain’s referees’ committee.

Court documents revealed that the La Liga champions paid £7.3m (£6.4m) between 2001 and 2018 to two com­panies which were owned by Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira.

Former Barcelona presidents, Josep Maria Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell, have been hit with corrup­tion charges as part of the investi­gation.

Judge Joaquin Aguirre Lopez is also investigating Laporta, who was previously president of the Catalan outfit between 2003 and 2010, but the 61-year-old has again insisted that he is innocent.

“I understand that there are no grounds to charge me. Knowing the history of this judge, I had numbers to end up investigated. But there are no grounds and there is no bribery. There is no continu­ing offence,” Laporta told Catalun­ya Radio.

“The prosecution described it as sporting corruption but in no case bribery. The judge is forcing this whole story. An investigating judge. It is quite surprising. I am very clear that all Barcelona fans can rest assured that this case will end up being shelved.

“There are two hypotheses. We paid money for services. It was paid by bank transfer and there are invoices. We presented 629 reports and 42 CDs.

“They were useful reports because they were used by people who needed to know this infor­mation. We have shown that there were reports, documented with videos in some cases.

“The judge’s hypothesis is that we bought referees and they hav­en’t proved that. And they won’t be able to because it’s not true.

“There is a sociological Madridis­mo in the centres of power. There is a lot of force. I have competed against this sociological Madridis­mo and I have won. They are afraid that what happened in my first term will happen again. We won a lot and that hurt them a lot. They suffered a lot.

“We are used to fighting against this. This Madridismo is in the media, in the world of sport. We have to accept this as normal but as Cules we have to know that we have to compete against this.

“They are panicking that we will repeat what we have already done, that we will win everything again.”

The club, which has also been accused of fraudulent manage­ment, breach of trust and falsi­fication of business documents, continue to insist that they simply paid for technical reports on refer­ees.-SportsMole.