translated from Spanish: Another joy for Messi: They file a fraud complaint against him after not seeing signs of criminality

In an order dated July 2, the head of the Central Court of Instruction No. 3 has decreed the provisional dismissal in the absence of indications of criminality after the proceedings carried out in a “particularly complex and exhaustive investigation” of almost two years. All this following the complaint filed in June 2019 by the former employee of the Federico Rettori Foundation, who claimed that Messi and his entourage would have benefited from the foundation to receive personal payments that were not intended for social purposes and thus get rid of paying taxes to the Treasury.In the letter, the judge goes further and points out that despite those two years of investigation at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, no it has been possible to prove any relationship or employment link of Rettori with the foundation. Moreover, the judge explains that from the labor documentation of the Spanish and Argentine entities, provided by the representation of the Messi Foundation, “it is clear that, in reality, the complainant did not maintain an employment relationship with it.” For Tardón “it is not only that the complainant has not proven to have suffered any damage” by the foundation, “but that the possible irregularities that he invoked in his complaint have clearly proven to be non-existent”. Among the facts described in the complaint itself, Rettori maintained that until 2013 the Leo Messi Foundation “was never registered in the Catalan Register of Foundations”, which means that all these years “it operated without any control or accountability in any official body”. As for the crimes against the Public Treasury and money laundering denounced by Rettori, the judge explains that, as reported by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, “the use of bank accounts in which the real ultimate owner of the assets is hidden, nor have concepts that do not correspond to reality been used.” In this sense, Tardón recalls that it was “the unreliability of the complainant’s contributions” that led to the agreement to “carry out an exhaustive investigation of the actions of the Leo Messi Foundation in relation to such accusations”, although in the end no indication was found. In fact, the judge insists that “much of the documentation provided by the complainant” was composed of “references to selected journalistic information, with respect to which” without discussing its “undoubted value in the field of information, cannot be the sole support of the survival of the object of the criminal proceedings”. Thus, Tardón argues that the doctrine obliges to file the case from the moment in which the commission of a criminal act is ruled out or because it does not seem duly justified the perpetration of the crime that would have given rise to the formation of the case or there were no grounds in his case to impute by them to a specific person , thus avoiding the undue lengthing of the criminal process.

Original source in Spanish