former playmate of the year jailed

A former Playboy bunny and the president of Bayern Munich football club were both jailed for tax evasion today.

former playmate of the year jailed

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Playmate of the year 2002 Swetlana Maslowskaya was jailed for two and a half years over a €1m tax fraud while former German international Uli Hoeness faces three and a half years behind bars for tax evasion amounting to €27.2m.

Maslowskaya, 32, was told by a Frankfurt court that it would be a year before she had any chance of release.

She accepted at least $2.5m gifts from her 90-year-old lover, German brewery boss Bruno Schubert.

The gifts included cash sums, cars, jewellery, exotic holidays and shopping sprees as well as an apartment in Salzburg, which she later sold without paying tax.

She said: “I am really sorry for what I did. I will never accept any gifts ever again.”

Hoeness, 62, admitted a string of tax evasion charges occuring in January last year.

The Bayern Munich president had chosen to go public in a bid for “voluntary disclosure”, a scheme which allows evaders to avoid trial by correctly detailing the taxes they have skipped and paying them back with 6% interest.

But during this week's trial it emerged he evaded sums ten times higher than the €3.2m he previously admitted.

Hoeness failed to provide sufficient details on individual taxable transactions after providing end of year statements for the relevant period.

The chief prosecutor said an effective voluntary disclosure would have had to be done with the same level of detail as a tax return.

Hoeness said he hid the money during a period of obsessive stock trading,

His defence had previously demanded a suspended sentence, emphasising his social engagement at the club.

A federal prosecutor previously described the case as an “unusually grave case of tax evasion”.

His legal team have a week to appeal against the three and a half year sentence.

Bayern Munich refused to comment on the sentence until after any appeal.

The sentences came as the latest move in a current tax evasion clampdown by German tax officials.

Frank Strachan, tax partner at Edwin Coe, said: "The severity of the sentence passed down to Uli Hoeness demonstrates the need to ensure disclosures to fiscal authorities are full and complete.

"I suspect we won't be waiting long until we start to see a raft of similar sentences for those charged with offshore tax evasion being passed down by the English courts.

"HMRC investigators are armed with 'Connect' (a sophisticated data management system) which finally allows them to draw up the dots.

"Anyone seeking to pull the wool over HMRC's eyes shouldn't be surprised to get a knock on the door followed by a trip to the cells."

 

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