Cristiano Ronaldo has not spoken to Real Madrid officials about a transfer away from Spain and he is not expected to leave the European champions during the summer, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez said on Monday.
The prolific striker scored twice to fire Real to a 4-1 win over Juventus in the UEFA Champions League final earlier this month, but his future at the club was thrown into doubt last week when Portuguese newspaper A Bola reported that he wanted to leave Spain after being accused of tax fraud.
Spanish prosecutors have filed a lawsuit against the player accusing him of defrauding tax authorities of 14.7 million euros (US$16.4 million) by hiding his image rights income between 2011 and 2014. Ronaldo has denied any wrongdoing.
The 32-year-old signed a new contract with Real until 2021 in November last year and has a release clause of 1 billion euros.
“I haven’t spoken with Cristiano, I learned about it because of what came out in the newspapers. I don’t have any solution, but Cristiano, like everyone else, has a contract and is a Real Madrid player,” Perez told radio station Onda Cero after earning a third consecutive mandate at Real. “I’m sure he will speak to us about what has happened [with the tax case], which has obviously affected his credibility, and we’ll see what happens.”
Ronaldo, Portugal’s all-time leading scorer, is the latest in a long line of players in Spain — among them Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Neymar — to be caught up in cases over tax or transfers.
Ronaldo is with Portugal at the FIFA Confederations Cup in Russia and has not said anything about his future since the A Bola story was published.
Asked about potential clubs Ronaldo could join, Perez said: “I’m not contemplating Ronaldo leaving.”
Ronaldo joined Real Madrid from Manchester United in 2009 for a then-world record fee of 96 million euros and is their all-time top scorer with 404 goals in 394 games. He has won three Champions Leagues, two La Liga titles and two Copa del Reys in his eight years in the Spanish capital.
“I haven’t learned very much about the situation, he’s at a very important tournament at the moment in the Confederations Cup and until that ends I’m not going to disturb the atmosphere of his team,” Perez said. “He has a contract and he needs to complete it. All we know is that he’s unhappy with the treatment he has had from the press, who have claimed that he is a tax cheat.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier