Ace Barcelona forward, Lionel Messi, has been given a 21-month jail sentence for tax evasion, as a Barcelona court found Messi and his father guilty of three counts of tax fraud.
Messi and his father, Jorge, were served the same sentence but under Spanish law, a prison sentence less than two years for a first-time non-violent crime can be served on probation, meaning they are unlikely to go to prison.
The court ordered Messi to pay a fine of around £1.7m and his father to pay £1.27m, but the sentence can be appealed through the Spanish supreme court.
The footballer told his trial he knew nothing of how his money was managed and admitted signing documents without reading them.
He told the court last month: “The truth is no, the truth is no, I didn’t know.
“As my dad explained earlier I just dedicated myself to playing football, I put my trust in my father, in the lawyers who had decided to manage this thing.”
Messi’s lawyers said he never examined a series of contracts between 2007 and 2009 which dealt with the income from image rights with companies including Adidas, Pepsi-Cola, Danone, Procter and Gamble, Banco Sabadell and the Kuwait Food Company.
He made a voluntary payment of £3.8m in August 2013 to cover unpaid tax and interest.
