In a long official press release, the MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo talks about a particular event in his life.
In recent days for Jorge Lorenzo ended one of the longest and most difficult challenges of his career. This is not one of the many Grand Prix or World Championships in which he took part in his glorious career, but a legal battle against the Spanish tax authorities, which went on for over five years, in which he was accused of serious financial faults which partly also affected his sports career.
The Spanish government has unjustly made millionaire claims against the five-time world champion, who retired from MotoGP at the end of 2019, after an uninspiring season riding the Honda. It is true that her mind was not totally free from other thoughts: just in 2019 she received a visit to the paddock in Catalunya from the tax inspectors who knocked on the door of her motorhome early. An event that certainly does not happen every day.
The end of a nightmare for Jorge Lorenzo
Finally every accusation against him has been filed and now Jorge Lorenzo expresses his considerations with an official statement. He remembers moving to Lugano many years ago, to find some peace of mind when he wasn’t traveling the world attending the GPs. But also, and he confesses it openly, to benefit “of the much more reasonable and less aggressive and confiscatory tax system than that of other countries“.
The legal troubles by the Spanish taxman they began in 2017, despite the fact that the Swiss authorities had repeatedly reiterated that his residence in Switzerland was regular and perfectly legal. “The Spanish authorities have always questioned everything. So they sent hundreds of requests to my sponsors and teams, trying not only to get information but also to publicly discredit me. They made me look like a tax evader in front of the media“. Jorge Lorenzo even had to advance large sums of money to avoid embargoes and “humiliating situations, for example appearing on the scammers list“.
It’s been a complicated five and a half years for the Majorcan driver, which also conditioned his mind and concentration in the race. “They defeated me emotionally, which other opponents have never done“, continued the three-time world champion MotoGP. Now that everything has ended in the best possible way and all the charges have been dropped, Jorge Lorenzo underlines that he never received “any form of compensation for the damage suffered. No apologies, private or public, no letters and no phone calls… The Spanish tax authorities went on a witch hunt and thought they had found a scapegoat. They made a mistake. But obviously no one will give me back the sleepless nights or the peace of mind I needed to concentrate on track work“.
