Mourinho cuts a deal to avoid facing jail over £3m ‘tax fraud’

MANCHESTER United boss Jose Mourinho has accepted a one-year suspended jail sentence over a £2.9million tax fraud in Spain.

Mourinho was yesterday said to have agreed a six-month term for each of two crimes in a plea bargain.

According to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the investigating court in Madrid is expected to be informed about the deal in the coming days.

The paper said the 55-year-old also agreed a fine totalling £1.78million – around 60 per cent of the amount defrauded.

First-time offenders in Spain do not normally serve jail sentences of two years or less – so the one-year jail term will almost certainly be suspended.

Manchester United declined to comment.

Mourinho’s affairs were placed under new scrutiny last year.

Prosecutors claimed the Portuguese manager owed Spain almost £2.9million in undeclared revenue relating to image rights in 2011 and 2012 when he coached Real Madrid. He was Mourinho will pay a £1.78m fine has accused of giving false information to Spain’s tax agency in 2015, prompting prosecutors to reopen a case that had been archived after Mourinho paid a six-figure fine. Mourinho – the self-styled Special One – played down any suggestion of wrong-doing after a hearing in November. He insisted he left Spain four years earlier with the “information and conviction that his tax situation was perfectly legal” and regularised his situation a couple of years later after he was told to pay more after a tax probe. At the time he told reporters: “I answered, I didn’t contest it, I paid, and I signed an official agreement with the state under which everything was definitively closed. “That’s why I’ve been here five minutes today to say to the judge exactly what I’m telling you.” But after the hearing a source at the court insisted that the criminal investigation would continue.