Barcelona's Lionel Messi Sentenced to 21 Months in Prison for Tax Fraud
Lionel Messi, the 29-year-old Argentine professional footballer who plays forward for Spanish club Barcelona has been sentenced along with his father, Jorge Horacio Messi, for tax fraud, according to Spanish media.
According to the BBC, Messi and his father were sentenced for defrauding Spain of $4.6 million between 2007 and 2009.
The Independent noted, however, that the Barcelona forward could avoid jail time as under Spanish law, any sentence under two years can be suspended.
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Prosecutors in the case against Messi, who is among the world's highest-earning athletes and often cited as the world's best soccer player, accused him of creating a string of fake companies in Belize and Uruguay to avoid taxation on $4.6 million in earnings from image rights.
The Barcelona forward told the court that he "knew nothing" about how his father and lawyers were handling his financial affairs because he was focused on soccer.
"I was playing football; I had no idea about anything. I trusted my dad and my lawyers," he told the court.
Messi said during the trial that he never suspected any wrongdoing when his father would ask him to sign contracts or documents relating to his image rights, according to the Independent.
"The truth is no, the truth is no, I didn't know," the soccer star told the court last month, according to the UK's Express.
"As my dad explained earlier I just dedicated myself to playing football, I put my trust in my father, in the lawyers who had decided to manage this thing."
Witness Eva Blazquez, who handled the player's tax declarations, also noted during the trial that the player did not see them.
"Leo didn't see them. The final supervision was done by the client, in this case, Jorge Messi," she said, according to the Independent.
"I didn't think it was necessary to inform him of everything," Jorge also noted last month.
A judge, however, rejected their testimony and found the soccer star and his father complicit in the crime concerning Messi's image rights with companies including Adidas, Pepsi-Cola, Danone, Procter and Gamble, Banco Sabadell and the Kuwait Food Company, according to the Express.
Government prosecutor Mario Maza told the court Messi and his father could not prove their innocence and were not able to show that the player did not have at least some knowledge of the corporate structures created to lower his tax burden in Spain the Express noted.
He noted in particular that Messi "knew more than he made it appear in court," adding that both men had "showed no credibility."
Messi moved from Argentina to Spain at the age of 13, after the FC Barcelona club agreed to pay for hormone-deficiency treatments, according to biography.com. He became a star in his new country, scoring at will while leading his club to championships. In 2012, he set a record for most goals in a calendar year, and in 2016, he was named Europe's Ballon d'Or winner for the fifth time.
He is almost universally regarded as the best player in the game, and has become the commercial face of soccer with endorsements from Adidas, Pepsi, EA Sports and Turkish Airways, among other companies.
He signed an extension with Barcelona that guarantees him a base salary of approximately $21 million per year through 2018, according to Biography.
