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FIONA HINDS

Contracts Your strategy needs to be

based around clear and effective professional contracts with your Club, agents and advisers so that your career can prosper.

ReputationAs your sporting career grows,

so too does your reputation. Professional and personal reputations need to be enhanced, managed and safeguarded.

Building on your brandA strong reputation results in

opportunities for sponsorship, endorsements and commercial deals. Ensuring that those agreements are properly drafted and that your brand is properly protected helps secure your career off the pitch.

Wealth planningOnce you’ve taken the lead, making

sure that you stick to the strategy requires careful planning and implementation. Advice on wills, investments, trusts and tax will help preserve your momentum while protecting your goals.

FamilyPersonal challenges can take their

toll and you need to be prepared to face them. Cohabitation agreements, pre-nuptials, divorce and children are important issues and you have to ensure that the best interests of you and your family are preserved.

AssetsYour investments need securing

and we can ensure that you know how to structure and protect your portfolio of assets – whether financial investments, artwork or real estate.

DisputesDespite the very best planning,

rarely does a playing career run perfectly smoothly. You need a tough, no-nonsense enforcer to deal quickly with clashes over contracts and relationships so that you can focus on your game.

DisciplinaryCompetitive sport involves

judgment calls and the boundaries are sometimes blurred. You need clear and practical advice to protect

your position if, for example, the rules have been broken or a drug test result is positive.

CrimeOccasionally, things can go badly

wrong. If you have a brush with the law, you need someone who can be there with emergency advice around the clock.

InjurySport can be bruising and you need

the right action should an injury impact on your career. We can work with you to ensure that if you are on the injury-list, you have the right structures in place not to lose out.

LegacyLegacy is the “target man” for

your team. The “sporting peak” is often over within a few years so you must have a long-term outlook and focus on life after sport. Advice on business ventures, personal investments and other commercial agreements means that your personal and professional success does not end when you hang up your boots.

Lois Langton and Fiona Hinds are the joint Heads of the Sports Individuals Group at Howard Kennedy LLP, a leading London law firm. Howard Kennedy acts for a significant number of sportsmen

and women and understand the sports industry from both a legal and commercial perspective.

For further information please contact Lois Langton and Fiona Hinds Lois.langton@howardkennedy.com | Fiona.hinds@howardkennedy.com

Law Howard Kennedy

LOIS LANGTON

Messi in a mess -

the importance of having a good team off the pitch

It’s a familiar plot: a wealthy person relies upon others to set up complex corporate structures to avoid paying tax, it doesn’t work and then all hell breaks loose. Lionel Messi will now face a criminal trial on allegations of tax fraud, which demonstrates the need for sportspeople to have a close circle of trusted and competent advisers.

The allegationsMessi and his father are accused of defrauding

the Spanish state on between 2007 and 2009. The allegation is that they avoided paying Spanish tax by creating a series of shell companies through which they sold rights to use Messi’s image.

The Court will hear allegations that the companies involved were in Uruguay and Belize, but the funds were allegedly moved through a number of companies, avoiding paying €4.165 million in taxes.

The story so farLionel Messi and his father have been charged

under Article 305 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which on conviction carries a fine of up to €24 million and up to 5 years in prison.

The allegations came to light in 2013 following a complaint made earlier that year and Messi Junior made a statement on his Facebook account shortly before the pair was summonsed to appear in court:‘…we have never committed any infringement.

We have always fulfilled all our tax obligations, following the advices of our Tax Consultants who will take care of clarifying this situation’.In August 2013 Lionel and his

father made a €5 million voluntary ‘corrective payment’ equal to the alleged unpaid tax plus interest. This, coupled with the Messi family account that Lionel did not participate in any decisions relating to management, was sufficient to persuade the Spanish prosecutors

in 2014 to apply to the court to remove Lionel from the charge sheet. However, the prosecutors’ argument that Lionel Messi was not ‘aware of the reach, dimension, purpose or impact’ of the scheme did not hold sway with the court and it refused to drop the charges against him. The Messis appeared in court again on Wednesday

10 June to appeal again for the case to be thrown out. Lionel’s defence argued that he had ‘never devoted a minute of his life to reading, studying or analysing’ the complex contracts. Unfortunately for the player, the court argued that lack of knowledge of the scheme should not mean impunity for a person benefiting from a structure which assists fraud, even if it has been organised and executed by others. It seems therefore that Lionel and his father will face trial for the charges.

The laws of the gameLois Langton and Fiona Hinds of Howard Kennedy talk you

through some keys areas of the law to help make sure that you’reahead of the game.

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Football has seen significant changes in recent decades. The creation and popularity of the English Premier League, the growth in TV revenues and the commercialisation of the game means that you have challenges to

face, both on and off the pitch. It is important that you have a legal team alongside you that will give you the best possible advice and guidance to ensure that your focus is on your professional success.

Lionel Messi is considered to be one of football’s best ever players. He has been given the FIFA World Player of the Year title a record four times. He is one of the most influential players at Barcelona, helping the team to win the Champions’ League four times in his career there.

Football is his expertise, not corporate structures, tax or finance, but he is still expected to comply with the law in these areas. That is why it is absolutely essential to the success of a sportsperson’s career that they should be able to switch off the background noise and focus on the pitch, or the court, or the pool, or the track. The best way

to do this is to have a team of world-class advisers around you who make the right decisions, but who communicate with you properly and effectively. Advisers need to be able to speak to you directly otherwise there is a danger that information may get lost in translation as it makes its way to you through a series of right-hand personnel.

Even if ultimately acquitted following trial, Lionel will still have learned an expensive and valuable lesson about the importance of understanding the implications of documentation that he signs.