Carlo Ancelotti returned for a second spell at Real Madrid as head coach, following the departure of Zinedine Zidane in the summer of 2021.
The Italian manager previously led the club to success during his first tenure, clinching the coveted La Liga title and the Champions League trophy in 2014.
Ancelotti’s return brought optimism to the club, as fans hoped for a resurgence in form and the rekindling of his successful partnership with the players.
His tactical acumen and proven track record in managing elite teams positioned him to guide Real Madrid back to the summit of Spanish and European football and also won the Champions League in 2022.
Real Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti could reportedly face up to five years in prison over allegations of defrauding the Treasury.
Reports in Spain claim the former Chelsea manager failed to pay over £900,000 in image rights in 2014 and 2015.
Ancelotti tax evasion battles exposed
The Prosecutor’s Office has requested four years and nine months in prison for Carlo Ancelotti, coach of Real Madrid, for tax fraud amounting to one million euros.
According to eldiario the Public Ministry, between 2014 and 2015, the Italian coach did not correctly pay taxes on his image rights in those years, transferred to entities that were not the football team, and defrauded the public treasury of 1.06 million euros. Those years, while he supposedly hid that income, the tax return came back to him.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Ancelotti, “in order to avoid taxation on the income from said image rights ,” launched a “complex and confusing” network of companies to channel these income. “He simulated,” he says, the transfer of his image rights to entities without activity and domiciled outside of Spain, “thus pursuing opacity in the face of the Spanish Public Treasury.”
Carlo Ancelotti was coach of Real Madrid in his first stage in Spain between 2013 and 2015, a period in which, among other titles, he won the Champions League.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, in parallel, he declared that he was a tax resident in Spain with domicile in Madrid but did not declare all his income: his income tax returns reflected the money that Real Madrid paid him but not the return he obtained from the exploitation of his assets. image rights.
He did it, like other footballers who have been convicted in recent years by the Spanish courts, through a corporate network that passed through London. Vapia was the company that had managed its image rights since 2013.
He used this company to formally present himself to Real Madrid as the owner of the image rights “despite the fact that they were not even formally attributed to him, since the transfer contract” was with another different company.
The statement came back to bite him
Ancelotti presented his tax returns those years, but they were not real. By omitting the money he received for the exploitation of his image rights, the statement returned him: almost 40,000 euros in 2014 and almost 530,000 euros in 2015, “amounts that were returned by the Tax Agency in both cases.”
In reality, his income was much higher. A total of 1.2 million in 2014 and almost three million more in 2015 “without Ancelotti or the other two entities having paid taxes on these amounts.”
Furthermore, says the Prosecutor’s Office, he also did not declare two homes abroad. In total, according to investigators, he stopped paying 383,361 euros in 2014 and 675,718 in 2015, more than a million euros of fraud in total.
