Argentine Official Meets FIFA President Sepp Blatter On Football Tax Avoidance

Argentina tax agency head Ricardo Echegaray met with FIFA President Sepp Blatter to tell him how football teams "are evading taxes" in the $3.7B player trading market, according to Panja & Duff of BLOOMBERG. Echegaray has traveled to the football ruling body’s headquarters in Zurich to inform Blatter that his agency has detected techniques used by clubs to direct transfers through "sporting tax havens." The visit comes a week after FIFA said it fined four Argentine clubs for trading players through a Uruguayan team for “reasons that were not of a sporting nature.” Deportivo Maldonado SAD, a team in Uruguay’s second tier with average attendances of about 200, and led by a group of U.K. businessmen, earned $14M since '11 "through trading players who never played for it" (BLOOMBERG, 3/21).