Joan Laporta appeared on the stage of the Auditori 1899 of the Camp Nou three minutes before 11 am on Monday, the time set for the start of that publicized appearance pronounced 61 days after the Negreira case broke out. The president of Barcelona likes to be punctual. But before he took the lectern to offer his explanations, those who took center stage were others. Because while the 110 journalists from 70 accredited media began to take their seats in the room, from a back door came the Compliance Officer of Barcelona, Sergi Atienza, accompanied by the head of the entity's legal services, Pere Lluís Mellado, as well as the lawyer Marc Molins. They carried four boxes, three garnets and a somewhat redder and larger. An appropriate scenography to fix the attention of the attendees. Inside the cardboard was the defense. His barricade. What irony.

Laporta, who came with a few pages that he rarely attended -his intimates always praised his memory capacity-, did take many glances at the four boxes. Because there were those "629 technical-arbitration reports, 43 CDs and four diverse reports" prepared between 2014 and 2018 by Javier Enríquez Romero, the son of the former vice president of the Technical Arbitration Committee José María Enríquez Negreira. None, of course, that belonged to his first presidential stage (2003-2010). Nor that he had the signature of the father, Enríquez Negreira, who is the one who assured the Tax Agency that his advice was "verbal". Although Laporta was responsible for repeating that if there were no previous reports it was because they were "destroyed" because they "expired".

During that appearance that lasted for two hours and four minutes, and with its board of directors sitting in the front row ready for the final applause, Laporta began with a presentation in which he briefly relied on a power point with five points, prepared between his Compliance department and the lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde . During that first stretch of speech, which lasted 35 minutes, the Barça president liked it because he knew by heart what to say: "No conduct with criminal relevance linked to the crime of sports corruption has been identified"; "these are standard sports advisory services in the professional sports sector"; "there is evidence of the provision of services and official documentation of invoices and payments"; and "the amount of the invoices is variable depending on the number of competitions that were analyzed".

But once the question time began, which lasted an hour and a half, Laporta moved away from the lectern to seek shelter on the stool. Microphone in hand, just like in the old days. The communication department of Barcelona accepted 34 questions, a turn that this medium could not access, as also happened with other media. And it was BarçaTV – subcontracted to Telefónica and whose workers live pending to know their future beyond June 30 – who began by going to the point: "Why did Barça pay Negreira's companies?"

Directors and executives of Laporta were pleased before the explanations of its president. They smiled and sought approval from journalists. Laporta, while winking at Ceferin's UEFA and Rubiales' Spanish Federation, went to the security corner of the attack on Tebas (LaLiga), but hardened the gesture when referring to the personation in the cause of Real Madrid. Without mentioning Florentino Pérez, yes, his onslaught was one of the fiercest that are remembered: "Madrid has been considered the team of the regime, a club that has been favored by arbitration decisions historically and today."

Laporta hesitated when asked what José María Enríquez Negreira was really doing in this matter, given that all the prominence of the appearance was his son Javier, "the service provider." When the president was asked about specific statements by Enríquez Negreira to the Treasury, Laporta systematically replied that he was not going to speak "in the mouth of third parties."

So after opening one of the boxes and leafing through the reports, "of quality and made by people with experience," Laporta did not have much more to answer, confident as he is that the payments made to Negreira's companies during his mandate are time-barred and that he should only go to court as a witness.

Laporta found in the loud applause of his managers a good couch.

  • Negreira Case
  • Joan Laporta

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