Carlos Tevez seeks to avoid paying Argentina's new wealth tax

Argentine football legend Carlos Tevez has filed a court injunction to avoid paying the country's new wealth tax, the latest example of the difficulty in making millionaires comply with the levy.

Tevez filed the formal complaint Thursday in Argentina’s national appellate court, according to a registration of the case in the justice system docket. Contacted by Bloomberg News, Tevez’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Nicolini, confirmed the injunction, which raises the unconstitutionality of the wealth tax.

Nicolini said that the complaint is confidential and declined to give more details. He estimated that currently there are already more than 100 presentations before the justice made by individuals to achieve exemption from the tax.

Argentina’s government passed a one-time, so-called extraordinary contribution that about 13,000 affluent citizens are expected to pay. The tax applies to Argentines with more than US$2.2 million in assets, and the levy varies depending on the amount and where the assets are held. The deadline to pay was Friday.

Lawmakers estimated last year the tax would rake in about 300 billion pesos ($3.2 billion), but through March, data show that the tax authority received just 6.1 billion pesos, or about two percent of that target, from the wealth levy. Dozens of rich Argentines are challenging the tax in court, calling it “confiscatory.”

Tevez plays for Argentina’s most famous team, Boca Juniors, where he won 10 cups. He was born in Fuerte Apache, an impoverished neighbourhood in the metro Buenos Aires area. In 2019, Netflix released the series, El Apache, a historical fiction account of his life.

He started playing as a child in the lower ranks of Boca Juniors, but his scoring ability catapulted him to Brazil and then to European football, where he played for almost 10 years and made a fortune. Tevez is one of Argentina's most successful players, having notched 29 international and national titles on teams such as Manchester United, Manchester City and Juventus.