The hours before the match against Leipzig couldn’t have been more hectic for Real Madrid, who experienced judicial upheavals yesterday morning. It had to be sporty and more or less what was expected: two penalty games imposed by the Competition Committee. The surprise came with the courts of Madrid and Carlo Ancelotti. The Madrid Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, as it was learned yesterday, requests four years and nine months in prison for the Madrid coach for an alleged fraud on the Treasury for an amount of 1,062,079 euros in the fiscal years of 2014 and 2015. The Italian coach led Real Madrid those two seasons. In the first he won the Champions League and the Cup, and in the second no major title and he was fired.
As reported by the public ministry, the Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of two crimes against the public treasury, since, although Ancelotti stated that he was resident in Spain for tax purposes and reflected that his address was in Madrid, he only registered in the his income declarations the remuneration of personal work received from Madrid and omitted the performance corresponding to the exploitation of his image rights, which he had ceded to other entities.
In its letter, the Prosecutor’s Office underlines that “in order to avoid taxation for the returns from the aforementioned image rights”, both those received by Real Madrid and other brands for various events, the technician went to a “complex ” and “confusing” network of trusts and companies interposed to channel the collection of image rights.
In this way, Ancelotti could have simulated the transfer of his image rights to entities “lacking real activity” with the aim of falsifying their real profits and “pursuing opacity in the face of the Spanish public treasury and the concealment of the real beneficiary of the returns from his image rights, so that neither he nor any of the aforementioned companies would have to pay taxes for the abundant amounts received in Spain or outside our country”.
Specifically, the Prosecutor’s Office is talking about the company Vapia Limited, which signed a contract with Ancelotti in July 2013 at the rate of 25 million euros for ten years in exchange for the exploitation of his image rights. Just one day later, the Italian was appointed as the company’s representative and was “granted the maximum powers of action”. And not only that, the duration of the transfer of its image rights was later also modified, which went from ten years to just three and the purchase price was lowered to one million euros.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Ancelotti submitted his self-assessment declarations corresponding to the tax on the income of natural persons in time, in which he affirmed his status as a resident in Spain. “By omitting all performance corresponding to the exploitation of their image rights (…) in this way their declarations resulted in installments to be returned, with a negative balance of 39,575 euros in the 2014 financial year and 529,076 of 2015, amounts that were returned to him by the Tax Agency in both cases.
As usually happens in these cases, Madrid remains silent because it considers the case a private matter for its coach.
