Barca pays $18.6M tax in Neymar case
MADRID — FC Barcelona says it has made a payment of $18.6 million to Spanish tax authorities related to last year’s acquisition of the Brazilian star Neymar in an attempt to settle a legal dispute that has highlighted the opaque and convoluted system of payments used by soccer clubs to sign players.
The additional tax payment, which Barcelona described as voluntary, comes after the club’s president, Sandro Rosell, resigned last month, a day after a Spanish judge accepted a suit accusing him of misappropriating money as part of Neymar’s transfer. The judge, Pablo Ruz, widened the case last week, indicting the club for suspected tax fraud.
Still, Barcelona emphasized Monday that it had not violated any law when it signed Neymar last summer, and called the payment a recognition of “a possible divergent interpretation of the exact amount of tax responsibility.”
The club said it would continue to defend itself in the case, declaring in a statement published online after a board meeting that it “has scrupulously fulfilled its fiscal obligations in line with its awareness at the time of the contracts and agreements signed in good faith.”
It is unclear if the voluntary tax payment will be sufficient to end the Spanish court case. The dispute has also spawned a separate legal action in Brazil by Santos, the Brazilian club that sold Neymar to Barcelona. Santos has accused Neymar’s father of keeping the club in the dark about a separate financial deal that he struck with Barcelona to transfer his son to the Catalan club.
Barcelona said it had agreed to a “voluntary contribution” of ¤13,550,830.56 to the Spanish treasury “to cover any potential interpretation made concerning the contracts signed in the transfer process for Neymar.” The club maintained its earlier tax payment “was in line with our fiscal obligations.”
That amount, however, is more than what the prosecution in the case had demanded last week. In its filing, the prosecutor, Jos Perals, estimated that Barcelona had defrauded the Spanish treasury of ¤9.1 million (about $12.5 million) by using multiple parallel contracts and “financial engineering” to reduce Barcelona’s tax liability.
The signing of Neymar was seen as a coup for Barcelona. The rising star of Brazilian soccer, Neymar had been a target for several other European clubs, including Barcelona’s archrival, Real Madrid.
At the time of the signing, Barcelona said it paid ¤57 million for Neymar. But after Rosell’s abrupt departure, the club’s new management disclosed that bringing Neymar to Barcelona had cost at least ¤86 million, including ¤40 million paid to a company directly managed by Neymar’s father, Neymar da Silva.
This month, Neymar da Silva has defended himself against the attacks by Santos and insisted that he had full authority to negotiate his son’s transfer.
The player has also come to the defense of his father. “I thank my father for helping me get to where I am and if he has earned many millions, what is the problem?” Neymar wrote in an Internet posting.
Separately, Ruz, who is in charge of the Spanish case, asked Swiss authorities last week to request from FIFA, soccer’s governing body, all the documents that FIFA received relating to Neymar’s contract. FIFA, which is based in Zurich, said earlier this month that it would not directly hand over such documents to the judge without a formal request being first lodged in Switzerland.
The court case was triggered by a lawsuit filed last year by a Barcelona club member, Jordi Cases, who accused Rosell of covering up the actual terms of the transfer of Neymar, a productive scorer whose full name is Neymar da Silva Santos Jr. Since then, Cases has expressed remorse about landing his beloved soccer club in a legal quagmire.
He has also called on others to question the legality of some other recent bigmoney transfers, notably last summer’s record purchase by Real Madrid of Gareth Bale, the Welsh star, from the London club Tottenham Hotspur. Real Madrid and Tottenham diverged slightly at the time about what value they disclosed for Bale’s transfer, which was worth at least ¤90 million.