Lawyers for football legend Franz Beckenbauer rejected claims he was paid millions as chairman of Germany's World Cup organising committee and sought to hide the sum from tax authorities
Franz Beckenbauer
Franz Beckenbauer
Berlin: Lawyers for football legend Franz Beckenbauer rejected claims he was paid millions as chairman of Germany's World Cup organising committee and sought to hide the sum from tax authorities.
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News website Spiegel Online had reported that Beckenbauer drew a fee of more than five million euros ($5.6 million) and that he failed to report the payment to tax authorities. According to Spiegel, the payment to Beckenbauer was taken from a donation of 12 million euros made by a World Cup sponsor, the gambling company Oddset.
But Beckenbauer's attorneys at Nesselhauf law firm rejected the claim, saying in a statement that the earning arose from his advertising work and that he had "been promptly taxed at his Austrian residence".
Remuneration for PR work
Separately, Theo Zwanziger, who was then boss of the German Football Federation, also told Die Welt daily that the sum was "not payment for his work at the organisation committee". Rather, it was a fee for Beckenbauer's PR work with the tournament's sponsors, he said. But the Spiegel claims had sparked anger from current DFB boss Reinhard Grindel, who accused the man nicknamed "the Kaiser" (the emperor) of lying and misleading the public.
"We know that Franz Beckenbauer worked for Oddset in the context of the World Cup. But we were not aware that he drew a sum of 5.5 million euros ($6.2 million) from the budget of the organisation of World Cup 2006," Grindel said in a statement.
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