Three million euros is the price former Portugal football team trainer Luís Filipe Scolari has had to pay to see the massive tax fraud case against him disappear.
Only last year, the flamboyant Brazilian said the case against him was nonsense. “If there is something wrong, it is not with me,” he told reporters – guaranteeing that he had always filled out his tax returns correctly.
But DCIAP investigators clearly thought otherwise, honing in on what was claimed to be €7.4 million in undeclared income related to Scolari’s image rights while he was domiciled in Portugal, between 2003 and 2007.
According to media reports, €2.5 million of that income came from “an offshore of former BPN” – the bank that had to be nationalised in 2008 due to crippling financial losses.
Since affirming in May last year that: “In all the countries I have ever worked, I have always declared my income”, Scolari had gone very quiet.
Yesterday, the upshot of DCIAP’s investigation was revealed on its website: “The Public Ministry considered that the elements of proof collected indicate the practice by the defendant of the crimes of fiscal fraud,”
Scolari was presented with a proposal that he pay a “global figure of €3 million”, which he accepted.
“The case has now been archived,” concludes DCIAP’s notice, adding that “in this investigation, the Public Ministry was helped by the AT tax authority”.
