Several days before the October 12 Juan Manuel Marquez-Timothy Bradley bout, a story emerged from the Mexican media regarding Marquez and a substantial amount of taxes owed to the Mexican government. Quickly buried under the usual fight week filler, the story vanished from U.S. media as soon as it appeared with the four-division world champ’s only response being that the charges were some sort of “misunderstanding.”
Now, according to various Mexican media outlets, almost a full week after his split decision loss to Bradley, Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and Public Credit has taken action to collect the reported 18 million pesos (approximately $1.5 million U.S. Dollars) owed them.
The Mexican tax agency has seized three bank accounts in Marquez’s name, containing a total of about 1.4 million pesos and may choose to confiscate personal properties held by the fighter. A failure to acknowledge and pay the debt could also result in a prison sentence of between 3 to 9 years.
Marquez, who made $6 million for the Bradley fight, has been a strong supporter of the currently ruling PRI political party and it’s thought that he may use political leverage to avoid the most serious consequences of this tax issue.
In other Marquez financial news, a minor controversy has emerged regarding the advertising on Marquez’s trunks for the Bradley fight last Saturday.
For the pay-per-view welterweight championship bout, Marquez placed a small ad on his trunks for the “Chiapas Verde” foundation, a non-profit organization formed to promote eco-tourism in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
The controversy involves the payment for that ad, (reportedly as much as one million pesos) which came from Leonardo Rafael Guiraro Aguilar, who is the head of the Chiapas Verde organization as well as Mayor of a town decimated by poverty and a lack of basic services such as running water and electricity.
In Aguilar’s town of Chilón, it is estimated that about 70.6 of its nearly 80,000 residents live in conditions the United Nations refers to as extreme poverty.
While no links have been made between the advertisement and public money, the Mexican media has battered both Aguilar and Marquez for the million peso expenditure set against the backdrop of Mayor Aguilar’s own poverty-stricken town.
In 2012, the advertising on Marquez’s trunks also touched off controversy during his third bout with Manny Pacquiao when an ad for the PRI party broke rules regarding advertising in the days prior to a national election.
The end result of that flap was a 700,000 peso fine issued to the PRI party by the Instituto Federal Electoral and an unsuccessful push to overturn election results in some areas.
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