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TAX FRAUD

Mourinho avoids jail but is hit by fine for tax fraud in Spain

Ex-Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho has avoided jail for tax fraud as part of a deal with Spanish prosecutors revealed Tuesday but will pay a fine of close to two million euros.

Mourinho avoids jail but is hit by fine for tax fraud in Spain
Photo: AFP

The 56-year-old is accused of committing tax fraud in 2011 and 2012 when he coached Spanish giants Real Madrid.   

According to the agreement seen by AFP, Mourinho accepted a one-year jail sentence immediately commuted to a fine of 182,500 euros.   

The Portuguese coach will also have to pay an additional penalty of €1.98 million ($2.3 million).

Mourinho already paid €1.14 million in 2015 as an administrative penalty and the deal stipulates thatprosecutors won't oppose that this amount be deduced from the overall fine.

The agreement still has to be validated by a judge.

Image rights

Mourinho, sacked by Manchester United in December following a string of disappointing performances, is the latest high-profile football figure to be judged over his tax affairs in Spain.

Spanish prosecutors accuse Mourinho, who coached Real Madrid between 2010 and 2013, of failing to declare income of €1.6 million in 2011 and €1.7 million in 2012.

The grounds for the case, as with a series of others involving football stars based in Spain, is how income from Mourinho's image rights was managed and declared.

Prosecutors believe by ceding his image rights to a series of companies based in tax havens, Mourinho committed fraud by not declaring the income those companies made from the rights.

Cristiano Ronaldo, now of Juventus, was also found guilty of tax fraud when at Real Madrid.

He was accused of having avoided paying millions in taxes due on his image rights between 2011 and 2014.   He too avoided jail but was ordered by a Spanish court last month to pay more than €3.5 million, part of a broader 18.8-million-euro payout agreed between his lawyers and Spain's taxman.

Ronaldo received a two-year jail sentence immediately commuted to a fine of €365,000 and another penalty of 3.2 million euros, according to the sentence.   

Barcelona's Lionel Messi, once Ronaldo's big La Liga rival, paid a two-million-euro fine in 2016 in his own tax wrangle and received a 21-month jail term.

The prison sentence was later commuted to a further fine of €252,000, equivalent to €400 per day of the original term.

Messi and his father Jorge Horacio Messi were found guilty of using companies in Belize, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Uruguay to avoid paying taxes on 4.16 million euros of Messi's income earned from his image rights.

Barcelona defender Javier Mascherano also agreed a one-year suspended sentence with authorities for tax fraud in 2016.

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TAX FRAUD

Denmark hits German bank with multi-million euro fine over tax fraud

Denmark slapped a German bank with a fine of 110 million Danish kroner (14.7 million euros) on Monday in a case which is part of the biggest fraud scandal the Scandinavian country has seen.

Denmark hits German bank with multi-million euro fine over tax fraud
Denmark's Tax Authority (Skattestyrelsen) in Copenhagen. Photo: Niels Christian Vilmann/Ritzau Scanpix

The case relates to the European “cum-ex” tax scam. 

North Channel Bank was found guilty of facilitating “1.1 billion kroner (that) was unjustifiably paid out from the Danish treasury,” according to a statement by the Danish Prosecution Service.

The German bank admitted its role in the fraud case and accepted the fine at the district court in the Copenhagen suburb of Glostrup, the statement continued.

The case is part of a wider affair in which Denmark is estimated to have lost 1.7 billion euros to fraudulent tax return claims.

First revealed in Denmark in 2015, it is considered the largest case of tax fraud in the history of the country, which is now revising its tax code.

The scam centred around companies, funds or individuals using a system of exchanging stocks in companies to claim multiple tax rebates for a single dividend payout.

The so-called “CumEx-Files”, an investigation published last October by big-name European outlets including German public broadcaster ARD and French newspaper Le Monde, showed that the practice was also used around Europe, costing Germany 7.2 billion euros and Belgium 201 million euros since 2001.

Danish prosecutors said the crime was committed when a number of actors made several fictitious stock trades to create “a paper trail,” and that the bank played a “crucial role” in its creation.

Capital gains made on the Danish stock market are normally taxed at 27 percent, but treaties between Denmark and certain countries allow beneficiaries based in these countries to be refunded all or part of this tax.

“It's very satisfying that we now have the first conviction in a court in the dividend cases,” prosecutor Kirsten Dyrman, said in a statement.

“All together this is the biggest fraud case in the history of Denmark, and has resulted (in) a significant loss for society and the treasury,” she added.

In March, Danish tax authorities reported that they had taken legal action against 470 individuals and companies related to the affair.

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