Spanish prosecutors are seeking a prison term of more than 10 years for the former Barcelona striker Samuel Eto’o for alleged tax crimes committed when he played for the Catalan club. In addition to a sentence of 10 years and six months, prosecutors are also demanding a fine of £12.11m for the four counts of tax fraud for supposedly defrauding Spain’s tax authority of almost £3.21m from 2006 to 09, according to court documents released on Thursday.

Prosecutors are seeking the same punishment for the player’s representative at the time, José María Mesalles Mata. The administrator of a company that facilitated the deals, Manuel de Jesus Lastre Abreu, is facing more than six years in prison and a fine of £1.85m. Prosecutors also want Eto’o to relinquish any possible fiscal incentives for a long period.

Eto’o and his lawyers could not be immediately contacted for comment, but in the past the player denied wrongdoing, saying he was not directly involved in his tax matters. Eto’o is among other current and past Barcelona players facing legal problems in Spain. In July, Lionel Messi and his father were sentenced to 21 months in prison for tax fraud, although they were not sent to jail because sentences of less than two years for first offences are usually suspended in Spain.

Neymar and Barcelona are dealing with the Spanish authorities because of the player’s transfer from the Brazilian club Santos in 2013. Prosecutors announced on Wednesday that they are seeking to punish the Brazilian player and his club, as well as his parents, his Brazilian club and its former president because of an investment group’s claim that they concealed the value of the star’s transfer fee.

In June, Barcelona paid a fine of £4.65m after acknowledging to Spain’s tax authority it made “an error in the fiscal planning of the player’s transfer”. Also this year, the Barcelona midfielder Javier Mascherano was handed a suspended one-year sentence for tax fraud, and the former defender Adriano was also charged with tax irregularities. Eto’o, 35, played for Barcelona from 2004 to 09. The Cameroon striker now plays with the Turkish club Antalyaspor.

Culled from The Guardian

Morocco has quit the fourth Africa-Arab World Summit in Equatorial Guinea in protest against the presence of a delegation from the Polisario Front, a group seeking the independence of Western Sahara. The Moroccan delegation made the decision to walk out of the summit in Malabo on Wednesday to protest “the presence of the emblem of a puppet entity in the meeting rooms,” the Moroccan news agency MAP quoted Morocco’s Foreign Ministry as saying.

Morocco is a major investor in Africa. “Morocco has partnerships with Central Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa. We cannot allow such a blow,” said a commentator, whose name was not mentioned in news reports. Equatorial Guinea’s Africa 24 network, which is close to the government, censured Morocco’s decision to leave the summit.

Morocco has made an official request to rejoin the African Union (AU), more than four decades after leaving the pan-African bloc in protest against the membership of Western Sahara. The country withdrew from the AU in 1984, when the mineral-rich and sparsely populated Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), commonly known as Western Sahara, was accepted as a member.

Morocco annexed Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, in 1975. It maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom, but the international community has not recognized the annexation. Western Sahara is home to the Algerian-backed Polisario Front, a Sahrawi rebel national liberation movement aiming to end Moroccan presence in the territory.

In 1991, Moroccan forces and Sahrawi rebels agreed on a UN-brokered truce and a referendum to settle the status of Western Sahara. However, the vote has never taken place. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan and Yemen as well as Somalia also left the one-day summit.

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The apparent African exodus from the international criminal court must be stopped or the most heinous crimes will be allowed to go unpunished, Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general and one of the ICC’s chief architects, has warned. Burundi, Gambia and South Africa said this year they would no longer recognize the court’s jurisdiction and announced their intention to quit. They claim the ICC disproportionately targets African leaders. Nine of the 10 cases taken by the court have involved former African rulers.

State impunity is back in fashion – we need the international court more than ever. Annan’s intervention is designed to influence the annual meeting of the Assembly of States Parties, whose members are signatories to the ICC. He warned the actions of the three African countries risked giving the false impression the entire continent was hostile to the court. Annan was pivotal to the court’s creation when he was UN secretary general, hosting the inaugural conference in Rome in 1998. Writing in the Guardian, he says: “Most of the continent’s democratic governments stand by the ICC. I stand by the ICC, because the most heinous crimes must not go unpunished.” He says Africa “was [the court’s] most enthusiastic supporter” at the ICC’s inception. “Memories of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide were still fresh in our minds. In fact, the first signatory of the treaty was an African country, Senegal. Africa remains the single largest regional bloc, with 34 states party to the Rome statute out of 124,” he writes.

Annan said the focus of the ICC’s work in Africa did not indicate any bias but rather Africa’s willingness to refer cases to it. “Of the nine investigations on the African continent, eight were requested by African states. Six African states referred their own situation to the ICC, and African states voted in support of the UN Security Council referrals on Darfur and Libya,” he writes. “Kenya was the only case in Africa opened independently by the court, but it enjoyed the enthusiastic support of a majority of Kenyans. They wanted justice for the 1,300 people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in election-related violence.”

Annan said Africa was not the sole subject of international justice, pointing out that criminal tribunals were first set up after the Second World War, at Nuremberg and Tokyo. After the cold war, more international or mixed tribunals were launched for crimes in Lebanon, Cambodia and Yugoslavia. The ICC has opened investigations in Georgia and is conducting preliminary examinations in Afghanistan, Columbia, Ukraine, Iraq and Palestine. He said the “ICC remains the continent’s most credible court of last resort for the most serious crimes … [It] does not supplant national jurisdictions; it only intervenes in cases where the country concerned is either unable or unwilling to try its own citizens.”

Culled from The guardian.com

A group calling for California’s secession from the US has submitted a proposal for a ballot measure on removing a piece of the state’s Constitution that describes it as an “inseparable” part of America. On Monday, the Yes California Independence Campaign proposed to include the matter on the ballot during the November 2018 gubernatorial elections across the US, where 39 state and territorial governorships as well as numerous other state and local elections would be contested. The request was filed with the attorney general’s office, asking it to “prepare a circulating title and summary of the enclosed ballot measure: “Calexit: The California Independence Plebiscite of 2019.”

The independence vote would be held sometime in the spring of 2019, provided that the group changes the California Constitution and then collects the number signatures required to put the measure on the 2018 gubernatorial ballot. The idea of a so-called “Calexit” was first brought up by the group more than two years ago but it only gained traction after Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory on November 8.

According to Marcus Ruiz Evans, the group’s vice president, the Yes California Independence Campaign has thousands of followers on various social media websites and some 13,000 people have volunteered to collect signatures. Evans said that Trump’s election showed that his organization was right in doubting the current electoral system’s ability to bring real change.

With a population of nearly 38.5 million people, California has 53 electoral votes, more than any US state. All of the state’s electoral votes went to Trump’s democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The final results of the presidential vote in the state would determine how many signature the group needs to place the matter on the ballot.

Evans said if 55 percent of the voters supported a referendum on the secession, the group would be able to take the matter to the United Nations according to the world body’s self-determination treaty. The majority support would amount to an internationally recognized threshold which in turn requires the state’s governor to ask the UN to recognize “the Republic of California” as a member.  To change the Federal Constitution which does not allow secession, the group needs the approval of Congress and 38 states, experts say.

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