Neymar faces a free kick – Sport – Kommersant
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Next week, the trial of one of the brightest strikers, the superstar of PSG and the Brazilian national team, Neymar, will begin in Barcelona. He is accused of fraud and corruption when he moved to Barcelona from Santos in 2013. The applicant is the Brazilian investment group DIS, which at that time owned about 40% of the sports rights to the player. Lawyers for the company claim that the real cost of the transfer differed from the declared one, in connection with which DIS received less money than it was supposed to. If found guilty, Neymar faces up to two years in prison and a fine.
On Monday, the court of the city of Barcelona will start hearing the case, in which the defendant is the leader of the Brazilian national team Neymar. A month later, he is due to perform as part of the national team at the World Championships in Qatar. The trial, which can take up to two weeks, will examine the story of the striker’s move from Brazil’s Santos to Barcelona back in 2013.
The case, which the Spanish authorities have been investigating for a long time, was opened at the request of the Brazilian investment fund DIS. In 2009, he bought 40% of Neymar’s transfer rights for €5 million. When the player moved to Barcelona, the fund received a share of his transfer. It amounted to € 6.8 million: Santos indicated that the total amount of payments received by him was € 17.1 million.
However, it soon became clear that the deal was executed according to gray schemes.
According to the investigation, approximately €40 million passed by the Santos cash desk and migrated from the accounts of Barcelona to the N&N group of companies controlled by Neymar’s father, who also acts as his agent.
The footballer’s mother is also listed as the owner of one of the companies included in this group. Moreover, the investigation revealed that in addition to these €40 million, there were other payments from Barcelona to the football player’s family. According to the Spanish law enforcement agencies, the real costs of the Catalans for the purchase of the striker were equal to €84 million.
The victim in this situation was not only DIS, but also the Spanish budget, which did not receive a significant amount of tax deductions. However, the dispute over tax evasion was settled: Barcelona transferred € 5.8 million to the budget as part of, as it was said in the documents, “correcting an error”.
With accusations against specific participants in the transaction, everything turned out to be more complicated. The Spanish prosecutor’s office, despite the fact that the case at some point seemed to have completely stalled, brought it to court, without abandoning attempts to prove the guilt of the suspects in fraud. True, over time, it somewhat lowered the alleged scale of violations.
From court documents that leading news agencies circulated back in July, it follows that, according to law enforcement agencies, Barcelona actually transferred Santos not more than € 80 million, but much less – € 25.1 million.
Along with the striker himself, who was also required to pay a fine of €10 million, the prosecutor’s office wants to punish his father with a two-year prison term. The former president of Barcelona, Sandro Rossel, is generally facing a five-year sentence under a corruption article, coupled with the same fine as Neymar, who has already experienced serious troubles regarding financial discipline in his career. In 2016, the Brazilian court acknowledged guilty of concealing income from taxation and ordered to pay the state more than €46 million.
The lawyer for Neymar and his parents from Baker McKenzie, meanwhile, reported Reuters: The party will insist that the Spanish courts in general “do not have jurisdiction to prosecute the Neymar family” because “the transfer was carried out by Brazilian nationals on Brazilian territory.”
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