Under Spanish law, a non-violent prison sentence under two years can be served as probation rather than jail time. The court decided of fining them instead of letting them serve jail time as both Lionel and Jorge doesn’t have any criminal records in the past.
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The companies – with names such as Sport Consultants and Sport Enterprises – were based in tax havens such as Belize, Uruguay and Switzerland where legislation kept the identities of their owners secret, according to the ruling.
Messi, who plays for Spanish club Barcelona and retired from worldwide duty with Argentina at the end of last month, is widely considered to be one of the greatest footballers of all time.
Footballer Lionel Messi has been handed a prison term of almost two years after being found guilty in a dispute centring on tax fraud relating to his image rights.
Argentine Messi, aged 29, was also fined €2m euros (£1.7m; $2.2m) by the court in Barcelona.
They can appeal the decision to Spain’s Supreme Court and that is what the pair’s lawyers indicated on Wednesday they would, saying they felt confident an appeal would succeed.
Messi told the court during the four-day trial in early June that he trusted his father with his finances and “knew nothing” about how his wealth was managed.
“There is no deliberate ignorance here, it’s fraud and that’s all there is to it, because he didn’t want to pay his taxes”, he said. “The information that the accused avoided having was, in reality, within his reach via trustworthy and accessible sources”.
Messi, who has held Spanish nationality since 2005, and his father had already paid €5 million to the tax authorities as a “corrective” measure after formal investigations were opened. This argument had originally been accepted by the Spanish Treasury, but the State Prosecutor had insisted on the player’s guilt.
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ESPN FC revealed that Barcelona announced their full support to their star forward.
