Investigations of bribery in relation to alleged payments made by Barcelona to a refereeing official have been ongoing and the club's president Joan Laporta is the latest figure to be charged. The Catalan giants are under investigation for "active bribery" due to alleged payments made to former refereeing vice-president Enriquez Negreira. The Spanish powerhouse are said to have started making payments to Negreira for a period of six years spanning from 2001 to 2007.  However, the statute of limitations on those alleged offenses has expired. So far, the La Liga title holders have been under investigation for a total of 33 payments totaling €1.6million  made to a company owned by Negreira between 2016 and 2018. Investigations may now be extended backwards up to 2008 just about the time Joan Laporta served his first time as the club's president. Other Barcelona presidents to be implicated in the scandal include Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, as well as former directors of the club Oscar Grau and Albert Soler. 

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Joaquin Aguirre a judge in the aforementioned case said that there were "more than ample indications that Laporta committed the same acts as subsequent presidents," amounting to paying "large amounts of money" to Negreira who was then the vice president for the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). "It is proven that the payments were made over about 18 years and that they increased year after year," the judge said. "It is proven that Enriquez Negreira stopped receiving emoluments from FC Barcelona once he ceased his position as vice president of the CTA in 2018. It is proven that the investigated Enriquez Negreira sent a burofax (business communication) to FC Barcelona referring to the dissemination of possible irregularities of which he was aware and that would seriously affect FC Barcelona," added the judge.

The judge said that Barcelona football club might have gained preferential treatment from officials as the payments gradually increased from €70,000 euros to €700,000 annually for 18 years until Negreira resigned from the CTA. The judge added: "By logical deduction, the payments made by FC Barcelona satisfied the interests of the club in view of their duration and the annual increase. From here it is also deduced that the payments produced the arbitration effects desired by FC Barcelona, in such a way that there must have been inequality in the treatment with other teams and the consequent systemic corruption in the Spanish arbitration as a whole, which does not mean that each and every one of the referees were corrupt, but it did mean that a group of them." 

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