Seems like things are getting from bad to worse for José Mourinho. Not only has he not achieved for Manchester United (so far), his previous club Chelsea is racing to the top of the Premier League (who he also failed last year). However adding to Manchester United’s poor performances, Mourinho is now being investigated for tax fraud.
José Mourinho’s financial affairs are being investigated after claims that millions of pounds were moved offshore to avoid tax.
It is alleged that the struggling manager’s advisers may have helped him avoid paying tax on earnings from the use of his image rights for product endorsement – something which has been strongly denied.
The claims emerged in a huge data leak of more than 18m documents, investigated for the past months by a group of media organisations including the Sunday Times.
The Real Madrid player Cristiano Ronaldo is another high-profile name mentioned in reports as having allegedly moved money to a tax haven. Ronaldo could have “hidden 150 million euros in tax havens in Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands”, according to claims in German newspaper Der Spiegel.
Tax havens and hiding wealth from tax inspectors is nothing new. The Panama Papers revealed that 140 political leaders were clients of Mossack Fonseca. This is just one law firm that is estimated to control just 5% – 10% of the global market in shell companies.
Alongside the inequality is the fact that Government have been preaching to the common person to work harder for less but have their fingerprints all over these tax-dodging and cash-hoarding activities.
Dodgy money moves around the world as easily as an email. Lets compare that to how people trying to move to escape war and poverty are herded and penned, beaten and deported. Look at the massive sums of wealth in tax havens and corporate cash-hoards, and compare it to the suffering and squalor of life under austerity.
The elite under the pretence of financial distress have over recent years imposed mass austerity on all of society which has disproportionately impacted the poor, the homeless and the disabled. The attack on pensions, the attack on benefits, the attack on core public services across the world has strangled those who have the least in society.
All of this mass austerity justified to save money, yet all done at the same time the elite were hiding their assets abroad, creating millions of offshore entities and avoiding tax on an industrial scale
The reality is that Capitalism has institutionalised inequality, that protects the rich at all costs and which has one law for the elite and one law for ordinary people
Capitalism as a system, has failed society and the poor. Today 2.4bn people live on less than $2 a day. There are more mobiles in the world than there are toilets and 780m people have no access to safe drinking water.
Then we have the like of Mourinho and Ronaldo kicking their millions in offshore accounts like they are kicking a ball in the net.
Fiscal polices in Islam are simple. There is no personal income tax in Islam, rather there os Zakat which is a simple 2.5%. The money collected in Zakat can only be used for only certain categories like taking care of the poor.
Britain and Europe’s complex tax system is designed to allow the super rich to pay nothing and puts the burden on the poor and vulnerable.
Football needs to ‘kick out’ many things. As well as kicking out racism, child abuse and misogyny- it now needs to kick out the ‘the dodgy ones’.
“And let those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend them in the way of Allah know that a severe and painful punishment is awaiting them.” [TMQ At-Tauba: 34]