Messi and father pay €5 million in tax case

Barcelona forward Lionel Messi and his father Jorge have paid US$6.6 million to the Spanish authorities after they were accused in June of filing false tax returns, a court statement said on Wednesday.

The pair had deposited 5,016,542.27 euros last month as a “corrective payment”, the court in Gava near Barcelona said.

They were still due to appear at a hearing on September 17, although their lawyer had asked for it to be postponed as he had another commitment that day, the statement added.

The Argentine World Player of the Year and his father, who both denied wrongdoing, allegedly hid more than four million euros by filing incomplete returns for the years 2006 to 2009.

The sale of Messi’s image rights had been hidden using a complex web of shell companies in Uruguay, Belize, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, the prosecutor’s office for tax crimes in Catalonia said.