Carlos Tévez during a game at Estadi Alberto J. Armando in Buenos Aires on April 3.
Photographer: Marcelo Endelli / Getty Images
Photographer: Marcelo Endelli / Getty Images
Argentine football legend Carlos Tevez has filed a court order to avoid paying a new wealth tax, the latest example of the difficulty in enforcing taxes on millionaires.
Tévez filed the formal complaint Thursday in Argentina’s national appellate court, according to a case record in the judicial registry. Contacted by Bloomberg News, Tévez’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Nicolini, confirmed the ban, which increases the unconstitutionality of the wealth tax.
Nicolini said the complaint is confidential and declined to give further details. He estimated that there are currently more than 100 lawsuits filed by individuals to get the tax exemption.
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The Argentine government approved a single, so-called extraordinary contribution that is expected to be paid by some 13,000 wealthy citizens. The tax applies to Argentines with more than $ 2.2 million in assets and the tax varies depending on the amount and location of the assets. The deadline to pay was Friday.
Lawmakers estimated last year that the tax would be achieved at about 300 billion pesos ($ 3.2 billion), but by March the data show that the tax authority received only 6.1 billion pesos, or about 2% of that goal, from the wealth tax. Dozens of wealthy Argentines are challenging the tax in court, calling it a “confiscation.”
Read more: Wealth tax sends rich courts in Argentina in a last-minute fight
Tevez plays for Argentina’s most famous team, Boca Juniors, where he won 10 cups. He was born in Fuerte Apache, an impoverished neighborhood in the Buenos Aires subway area. In 2019, Netflix released the series “The Apache,” a fictional story of his life.
He started playing as a child in the lower ranks of Boca Juniors, but his goal-scoring ability catapulted him to Brazil and then to European football, where he played for almost ten years and made a fortune. Tévez is the most winning Argentine footballer after Lionel Messi, having won 29 international and national titles for teams such as Manchester United, Manchester City and Juventus.