FIFA not responsible for players’ tax arrangements – Infantino

Gestifute, the firm representing Mourinho and Ronaldo, said in a statement that the allegations — based on information from the Football Leaks whistle-blowing site — were unfounded.
Even so, Barcelona and Argentina star Lionel Messi and his father were found guilty of tax fraud in the summer, and his club and international teammate Javier Mascherano had earlier been found guilty of tax offences.
“If somebody does not pay taxes or drives too fast or causes an accident while under the influence of alcohol or whatever then FIFA is not responsible for it,” Infantino told Spiegel Online on Monday when asked about the tax issues.
“I think that it’s not a question of FIFA regulations. Everyone has to pay taxes and abide by the laws, and everyone is responsible for his actions before the prosecuting and tax authorities. If someone breaks the national tax regulations then it’s up to the authorities to take care of it.
“What we can do is to bring transparency to the financial transactions happening in football and also to the compliance with all legislations. The integrity of the match has to be the decisive factor. That’s also the reason why we banned third-party ownership (TPO).”
TPO, which became illegal under FIFA rules in May 2015, is the practice of a club selling a share in a player to a third party, which then cashes in when the player is sold. Although it has been banned by FIFA, Football Leaks has reported in recent weeks that several players are still under TPO, although it said most of the contracts were signed prior to the ban.
Infantino, who was elected in February, said: “We only just started, and there have been a few appeals at courts in different countries, but we at least raised awareness for something which was not deemed a problem previously. You can still bypass the ban, yes, but the obstacles for that are higher than before.”
The FIFA president also spoke about the growing influence of players’ agents, and cited the fast-growing transfer market, which annually moves between €2 billion and €3bn for international transfers, saying it is “about time we analyse it and look at numbers, which grow every year.”
Infantino said one of the measures could be to make public the fees paid to the agents, and pointed toward the English FA, which publishes the fees.
“The problem is that there is no full transparency,” he said. “The English FA is a role model because it has published agent fees for a while now. This helps a bit. We need to find way to bring even more transparency to this system.”
The Football Leaks stories were published by Der Spiegel and its partners with the help of a whistleblower presenting them with 1.9 terabytes of data on the money streams in football.