FC Barcelona Demand La Liga President Javier Tebas Resign Immediately

FC Barcelona has demanded that La Liga president Javier Tebas resigns through an official statement.

The Catalan club were responding to a La Vanguardia report published on Monday. It alleged that Tebas provided false evidence to the Prosecutor’s Office, in relation to the ‘Caso Negreira’ scandal where Barca have been charged for “continued corruption” in relation to payments made to the Former Vice President of the Referees Committee Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira.

Later that afternoon, Barca sent out an official press release to members of the media where it said that Tebas should step down out of “dignity and respect for the presidency of La Liga”.

The statement in Catalan noted that Tebas was linked to being “an executor in the presentation of false evidence before the Prosecutor’s Office to incriminate our club”, which has forced FC Barcelona to express its “deep anger” and “indignation”.

“For this reason, we urgently require the president of La Liga to appear publicly to offer explanations, beyond the tweet sent in the morning by Mr. Tebas,” the club continued.

Following publication of the La Vanguardia report, Tebas tweeted that the news was “false” and that the league was not accusing “anyone”.

“The news itself corroborates this by pointing out what the letter to the prosecution said, nor does it imply an exercise of concrete accusation against anyone,” Tebas added.

Barca’s statement continued by saying that the club, “​​as president Joan Laporta has been saying in recent weeks”, feels that it is the “victim of a media lynching for facts that never happened”. “Barca has never bought referees,” it boldly stated.

“A handful of media and commentators have participated in this harassment with more or less bad intentions,” Barca said, with La Liga among those that have been “opening fire against our club” through “contributions from its president that have only gone in one direction: trying to condemn us before public opinion before the facts are judged”.

Barca highlighted how this is not the first time the president of La Liga “has used all his media machinery” to blast FC Barcelona. “But, apart from his usual tirade, we could never have imagined that he would try to incriminate our club with false evidence,” it lamented.

Barca wrote that the report published by La Vanguardia is “of such gravity” that it should alert all of the Spanish top flight’s 20 clubs “due to practices that do not have any relevance to the functions that are attributed to the president of La Liga”.

“For this fact only, that of attributing functions that do not belong to him, although also out of dignity and respect for the presidency of LaLiga, Mr. Tebas should resign from his role,” the Catalans stressed.

“However, aware of his obsession to pursue FC Barcelona and constantly show his aversion and manifest antipathy towards our club, we understand that the current president of La Liga will persist in his leadership of continuing to harm our club,” Barca concluded.

The La Vanguardia report alleged that Tebas sent false evidence to the Prosecutor’s Office on February 22 and attempted to directly implicate former FC Barcelona presidents Josep Bartomeu and Sandro Rosell for alleged unfair administration and misappropriation.

Tebas allegedly did this by submitting a handwritten document penned by deceased former Barca director Josep Contreras, yet Contreras’ family have said that it did not contain the names of the former Barca presidents.

This would mean that the letter Tebas allegedly put forward to the Prosecutor’s Office has nothing to do with ‘Caso Negreira’. Instead, according to Contreras’ family, the document, which was written decades ago, only contains the names of Contreras’ lawyer Emilio Roman, the accountant of the companies he ran, Ramon Rosell, and Banca Catalan employee Josep Maria.

Barca’s explosive statement and demand comes after Tebas suggested Laporta should resign if he cannot explain the payments made to Negreira “well”.

El Mundo reported that Barca paid over $7 million to Negreira from 2001 to 2018, but the club denies wrongdoing and claims that the payments were made honestly for consultation work which can be proven.