We study the role of a light scalar nonet in the interesting decay &eegr; → 3&pgr;. The framework is a Chiral effective Lagrangian of pseudo‐scalars, scalars and vectors. At leading order , the scalars increase the predicted width by about 14&percent;. We note that although individual scalar contributions are not small, there are cancellations among the scalar diagrams. Including higher order symmetry breaking terms reduce the amount of cancellations among the scalar diagrams but the total predicted width remain the same. The vectors contribution is found to be very small. A preliminary discussion of the related decay &eegr;′ → 3&pgr; is given. We found that the leading order results of pseudo‐scalars alone are reasonable and close to the experimental data. Including the scalars or the vectors gives a huge enhancement indicating the importance of higher order corrections in this case. © 2003 American Institute of Physics