The municipal court of Zagreb dropped charges against Croatia’s national football team player Dejan Lovren for giving false testimony at the trial of the former FC Dinamo chief Zdravko Mamic, local news portal dnevnik.hr reports on Monday.
Liverpool’s defender Dejan Lovren together with the Real Madrid midfielder and Croatian national team captain Luka Modric testified as witnesses in Mamic case. They were both charged with giving false testimony. In December, the court dropped charges against Modric, and now against Lovren as well.
The prosecution charged Lovren for giving false testimony on the date he signed the annex of the contract with his former club Dinamo Zagreb. During the investigation against the former FC Dinamo chief, Lovren allegedly said that he had signed the annex to the contract with Dinamo Zagreb in 2010, when he was already transferred to the French club Olympique Lyonnais, only to change his testimony at the court when he said he did it in 2007, while he was still playing for Dinamo.
A controversial contract regulates a distribution of the transfer money between him as a player and Dinamo Zagreb in the proportion of 50-50 percent. Lovren allegedly forwarded the entire amount he had earned from his transfer to Zdravko Mamic’s account.
In June 2018, a court in Croatia sentenced Dinamo Zagreb chief executive to six and a half years in prison for illegally siphoning millions of euros from the club on transfers from Dinamo Zagreb, as well as tax evasion. On the eve of the verdict, Mamic fled across the border into Bosnia and Herzegovina where he still lives, Xinhua reports.
