Barça chief Laporta defiant over bribery charges

Barcelona president Joan Laporta said he remains calm despite being personally charged with suspected bribery over the refereeing scandal engulfing the Catalan club this week.

Laporta, 61, was added to the probe into payments worth over €7 million ($7.3m) made to companies linked to the former vice president of the refereeing committee, José María Enríquez Negreira, between 2001 and 2018.

"Knowing this judge's history, we were warned by our defence team this could happen, but as there is no crime of bribery, it cannot prosper," Laporta told Catalunya Radio on Thursday.

"I am a lawyer and I am calm about that. They can't prove anything because it's not true.

"The judge's criteria is even contrary to the prosecution, who made it clear that for them it was sporting corruption and false administration, but in no case bribery. This will end with Barça being absolved."

Prosecutors first filed a complaint over the payments in March, with the investigating judge, Joaquín Aguirre López, adding bribery to the list of charges in September.

Barça as a club, ex-presidents Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, former executives Oscar Grau and Albert Soler and Negreira and his son were originally named as defendants, but not Laporta.

However, López asserted this week that Laporta, as well as his board of directors from the period in question, should also face the same charges because the latter years of his first spell as president, between 2003 and 2010, should not be time-barred.

Laporta said the case is motivated by an inherent bias against Barça stemming from a societal favouritism for their Clásico rivals, Real Madrid.

"There is socially-ingrained Madrid favouritism in circles of power that is very strong," he added. "It exists and is protected in certain media outlets, certain political circles and in sections of sport.

"We have to accept it. I suffered it during my first spell in charge. Now it is repeated because we are getting better and better at all levels, sporting, economic and institutional.

"They are afraid that what happened in my first tenure is repeated. We won a lot and that damaged them greatly. They have taken advantage of the Negreira case to dirty Barça's name. We can't allow it."

Barça paid Negreira's companies over a 17-year period while he was the vice president of the refereeing committee. He had previously been a referee in the Spanish top flight.

Laporta has said the payments were for "technical reports about referees" and has repeatedly denied the club has ever "bought referees or influence."

However, prosecutors accused Rosell and Bartomeu of having an agreement with Negreira in which "he would carry out actions aimed at favouring Barça in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club and thus in the results of the competitions."

Rosell was Barça president from 2010 to 2014 before Bartomeu replaced him. After six years at the helm of the Catalan club, Bartomeu resigned in 2020, with Laporta elected as his replacement in 2021.

Barça were originally charged with alleged corruption in sport, corruption in business, false administration and the falsification of commercial documents in March.

The bribery charges were added in September after the judge said Negreira "exercised public functions" as vice president of the refereeing committee, which equates him to a civil servant.