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FC Barcelona has commissioned the internal investigation of the Negreira case to the lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, who defended the historic leader of Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña (ERC) Oriol Junqueras during the trial of the 'procés'. As EL MUNDO has learned, Van den Eynde has been working for weeks on the preparation of a compliance report on the payments made by Barça to the former vice president of the Spanish referees, José María Enríquez Negreira, who came to receive 7 million euros in almost two decades.

The lawyer, located in Barcelona, became known throughout Spain as a result of having defended the leader of ERC and former vice president of the Generalitat Oriol Junqueras and the former Catalan minister Raül Romeva in the cause of the procés. Van den Eynde played the legal defense of both throughout the judicial procedure and was the lawyer who exercised the defense of both in the trial that was held for four months in the Supreme Court in 2019.

Now, FC Barcelona has entrusted him with the task of investigating internally what controls failed so that an entity of the size of the blaugrana club paid for years bulky sums of money to the former number two of the referees, Enríquez Negreira, without there existing, for example, a contract that regulated that commercial relationship.

Barça president Joan Laporta announced that he would give a press conference as soon as he had the result of the club's internal investigation and avoided revealing who had entrusted him with that task. The Catalan club insists that Laporta will appear publicly to give explanations as soon as he has the result of the internal investigations. So far he has limited himself to defending himself by saying that there is a campaign against Barça but has avoided descending to the detail of the operations.

For this reason, the president of La Liga, Javier Tebas, said he was "ashamed" to see that the Barça president still does not give "an explanation" to this scandal. Tebas has already warned that if Laporta does not adequately justice the payments to the former number two of the arbitrators, "he should resign."

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