Football great Lionel Messi could have his 21-month prison sentence for tax fraud substituted for a fine after a Spanish prosecutor said on Friday it was open to dropping the jail term.<\/p>\n
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The judge in charge of the case will make a decision bearing in mind the prosecutor’s recommendations. Judges usually follow the state prosecutor’s guidance in Spain.<\/p>\n
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Barcelona great Messi and his father Jorge were found guilty by a Catalan court last July on three counts of tax fraud between 2007 and 2009 to the tune of 4.1 million euros ($4.6 million) on image rights.<\/p>\n
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An appeal against the sentence was rejected by Spain’s Supreme Court in May.<\/p>\n
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Neither Argentina captain Messi nor his father were expected to serve time in jail, as under Spanish law sentences under two years can be served under probation.<\/p>\n
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The Barcelona-based prosecutor handling the case also said that if the judge did not want to swap the prison term for a fine, it was open to a three-year suspended prison sentence for Messi and his father considering they had no prior offenses, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n
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Messi’s case was one of the first high-profile investigations by Spanish authorities into top football players’ tax affairs. The state prosecutor earlier this month accused Real Madrid striker Cristiano Ronaldo of knowingly using a complex business structure to hide image rights income in Spain.<\/p>\n
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Ronaldo has denied any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
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Messi, who has won eight La Liga titles, five King’s Cups and four Champions League crowns with Barcelona, finished top scorer in Spain this season with 37 league goals.<\/p>\n
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The five times world player of the year is Barcelona’s all-time top scorer and their highest-paid player.<\/p>\n
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Messi and his father defrauded the Spanish tax office of 4.1 million euros between 2007 and 2009 by using a web of shell companies based in Belize, Switzerland and Uruguay to evade taxes on income from the player’s image rights.<\/p>\n
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The maximum fine allowed by law in substitution for Messi’s 21-month prison sentence would be 255,500 euros, Reuters calculated. This would be on top of a nearly 2 million euro fine that was handed down as part of last year’s sentence. ($1 = 0.8960 euros)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Football great Lionel Messi could have his 21-month prison sentence for tax fraud substituted for a fine after a Spanish prosecutor said on Friday it was open to dropping the jail term. The judge in charge of the case will make a decision bearing in mind the prosecutor’s recommendations. Judges usually follow the state prosecutor’s guidance in Spain. Barcelona great Messi and his father Jorge were found guilty by a Catalan court last July on three counts of tax fraud between 2007 and 2009 to the tune of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7949,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7950,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7948\/revisions\/7950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}