1 Fabio Capello In England it goes like this: you earn money and you pay some of it back to your beloved government in tax. In Italy, surprisingly perhaps, it works in exactly the same way, even if, as prosecutors suspect of our national football manager, you earn money on sponsorship deals and you squirrel away some booty (a trifling £7m) in foreign climes. A star is torn. Bring on Switzerland. Or at least the Swiss banks

2 Diego Maradona There he was at Rome’s airport in 2001 and there they were, a crowd waiting to greet the great footballer. Alas, they were Italian tax police after £16.6m. “I haven’t got the money on me,” Diego chortled. He wasn’t laughing five years later when a judge rejected an appeal and told him the sum owed now stood at £21m

3 Chris Eubank Ah, VAT; the rich man’s burden, the creative accountant’s plaything. Eubank went bankrupt in 2005, owing £1.3m to the VATman. The collection of walking canes and jodhpurs had to go. “I’m not bankrupt of craic,” he said. “I’m not bankrupt of fun, life, dignity, character and essence. Money’s just a medium”

4 Peter Graf Steffi said she knew nothing of her father (and, oh dear, manager) Peter’s maverick accountancy with her tax returns. In 1997 he got 45 months in jail and Steffi paid a whopping fine

5 Lester Piggott A bloodstock baron, he earned lots of money and paid lots of tax, except for the £3.25m he somehow neglected to mention to the tax office. He served about a third of his jail term, which was roughly the same proportion of tax he should have been paying

6 Wayne Lineker Gary’s sports-bar-owning brother’s two-year sentence followed a complex scam of Iberian bar takings, carrier bags, bureaux de change, the Linekers’ unwitting mum and £220,000 Revenue & Customs could have spent on traffic lights. Mismatch of the day, quipped no one

7 Boris Becker What Boris described as “a mistake” led to him underpaying his German tax by the piffling sum of €3m by living in tax-unfriendly Munich while claiming to live in tax-friendly Monaco. He finally paid up and, in 2002, received two years probation instead of jail

8 Valentino Rossi Italian tax authorities claim the motorcyclist owes £90m on earnings from 2000, the year he moved to London. In response, Rossi says his advisers have “respected the rules”

9 Alberto Tomba What a pesky thing sponsorship income is. So easy, as skiier Alberto “last to bed, first to finish” Tomba discovered when he forgot to tell the authorities about £3m of it in the 1990s. He paid up and avoided a tax fraud conviction

10 Darryl Strawberry The baseball star liked his cocaine and his prostitutes (both tax-free purchases) but was less keen on taxes on his income from baseball cards. In 1994 he was forced to pay $450,000 and sentenced to six months “home confinement”, which is a bit like prison and a bit more like paradise

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