Former world tennis No. 1 Boris Becker was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on Friday by the British courts for financial offenses linked to his personal bankruptcy and must be imprisoned in the process.
• Read also: Good start for Leylah Annie Fernandez
Aged 54, Boris Becker was found guilty in particular of having hidden 2.5 million pounds sterling (3 million euros at the current rate) in assets and loans to avoid paying his debts.
He will have to serve half of his sentence behind bars before being eligible for parole.
Boris Becker arrived Friday morning in a London taxi at the court, walking hand in hand with his companion Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro, before returning to the building. Serious-faced, he wore a purple and green tie, the colors of Wimbledon, while his eldest son, Noah, 28, entered with a sports bag.
Declared personal bankruptcy in 2017, the six-time Grand Slam winner, who has lived in the UK since 2012, was found guilty on April 8 by London’s Southwark Crown Court of hiding assets or transferring funds to escape his debts.
“Boris Becker’s conviction makes it clear that hiding assets in bankruptcy is a serious offense for which we will prosecute offenders and bring them to justice,” said the managing director of the Insolvency Service, an agency British government responsible for administering bankruptcies.
Twenty years ago, Boris Becker was sentenced in Germany to a suspended prison sentence after disputes with the tax authorities. A warning that British judge Deborah Taylor criticized him for not having taken into account.
Missing Trophies
“You have shown no remorse or acceptance of your guilt and have sought to distance yourself from your offenses and your bankruptcy”, launched the judge Deborah Taylor, considering that Boris Becker has shown “no humility” .
According to his lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw, “his reputation is in tatters”, “he will not be able to find a job and will have to rely on the charity of others to survive”.
Boris Becker, who disputes all the charges, had been acquitted of twenty other counts, including those relating to the disappearance of his trophies. He had assured the hearing that he did not know where they were.
Among the nine accolades creditors would have liked to get their hands on are two of his three Wimbledon cups, two Australian Open trophies and his doubles gold at the 1992 Olympics.
The former tennis star said during the trial, which was held from March 21 to April 8, that she still has “many” of the awards and memories amassed in 15 years on the circuit, but some have disappeared.
He had already sold part of his awards at auction for 700,000 pounds (840,000 euros) in order to pay off part of his debts.
At the time of his bankruptcy, his debts were estimated at up to 50 million pounds sterling (59 million euros).
Tarnished “Becker brand”
The announcement of his bankruptcy came a few days before the Wimbledon tournament, where the first German player to win a Grand Slam title was working for the BBC and Australian and Japanese television.
At the hearing, he told how much he had been “shocked by the situation”. “It was all over the news, I walked through the gates of Wimbledon and everyone knew. I was embarrassed because I was bankrupt,” he said.
According to him, his bankruptcy and his treatment in the media damaged the “Becker brand”, so much so that he then had difficulty repaying his debts.
This case is not the first for Boris Becker, a restless sportsman, who had lived in Monaco and Switzerland before settling in England.
He has already had legal setbacks for unpaid debts with Spanish justice, concerning work in his villa in Mallorca, and with Swiss justice, for not having paid the pastor who married him in 2009.
In 2002, the German courts sentenced him to a two-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 500,000 euros for some 1.7 million euros in tax arrears.