Carlos Tevez during a game at Estadio 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 of forcing millionaires to comply with the levy.
Tevez filed the formal complaint with Argentina’s national court of appeal on Thursday, according to a registration of the case in the role of justice. Tevez’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Nicolini, who was contacted by Bloomberg News, upheld the order, which increases the unconstitutionality of the wealth tax.
Nicolini said the complaint is confidential and declined to provide further details. He estimated that there are currently more than 100 court presentations made by individuals seeking exemption from the tax.
Read more: Tax-the-Rich initiatives are receiving support across Latin America
The Argentine government has passed a one-time, so-called extraordinary contribution that is expected to pay about 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 where the assets are held. The deadline for payment was Friday.
Lawmakers last year estimated the tax would be about 300 billion pesos ($ 3.2 billion), but through March data shows that the tax authorities received only 6.1 billion pesos, or about 2% of that target, from the wealth tax. Dozens of wealthy Argentines are suing the tax in court, calling it ‘confiscatory’.
Read more: Wealth tax sends Argentina’s wealthy to court in last-minute battle
Tevez plays for Argentina’s most famous team, Boca Juniors, where he won 10 cups. He was born in Fuerte Apache, a poor neighborhood in the Buenos Aires metro. In 2019 Netflix released the series ‘El Apache’, a historical fictional account of his life.
He started playing in the lower ranks of Boca Juniors as a child, but his scoring ability catapulted him to Brazil and then European football, where he played for nearly 10 years and made a fortune. Tevez is the most winning Argentine footballer after Lionel Messi, with 29 international and national titles in teams such as Manchester United, Manchester City and Juventus.