La Jornada – After 8 months in prison, Becker is released from prison and returns to Germany

Berlin. After eight months in a British prison where he was serving a sentence for financial crimes, controversial tennis world number one Boris Becker was released on Thursday and immediately traveled to Germany.

“Our client Boris Becker has been released from prison in England and left the country today (Thursday) for Germany,” the German tennis legend’s lawyer announced.

Christian Oliver Moser said Becker, 55, “has served his sentence and is not subject to any criminal restrictions in Germany.”

Moser declined in advance for “privacy reasons” any questions “about his place of residence”.

The former champion was to arrive in Munich this Thursday afternoon on a Cessna from the private jet company Air Hamburg, according to the weekly. Der Spiegel.

According to British media, the plane was chartered by an audio-visual company, whose name was not released, who would have paid a generous sum to tell its story.

The Apple TV platform will soon broadcast a documentary in which the former champion makes statements, but there will be further interviews with other media.

According to the British news agency, the Press Association (PA), which did not cite sources, Baker, six-time Grand Slam champion, was released from Huntercombe prison, about 60 kilometers west of London, in the morning.

The British newspaper reported that his mother, Elvira Baker, 87, described her son’s long-awaited return to the country as “the best Christmas gift”. the sun.

Baker, who had been residing in the UK since 2012, was sentenced by a British court on April 29 for illegally concealing or transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid paying his debts after filing for bankruptcy.

The former German tennis star, whose professional career lasted from 1984 to 1999, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after being found guilty of concealing about 2.5 million pounds ($3 million).

He was declared bankrupt in 2017, after executing a series of bad deals. The debts of the former star, the youngest winner of the English Wimbledon Championships at the age of 17, were estimated at up to 50 million pounds sterling (59 million euros).

During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Becker collected 1.13 million euros ($1.22 million) from the sale of a Mercedes car dealership he owned in Germany, which he paid into a professional bank account that was used as his personal “piggy bank”. which he paid for luxuries and school fees for his children.

The Director General of the Insolvency Service, the UK government agency responsible for managing bankruptcies, confirmed.

Previous court problems

20 years earlier, Becker had already been sentenced to prison in Germany, and his application suspended, due to problems with the tax authorities.

British judge Deborah Taylor admonished the former tennis player for failing to heed the warning that the first sentence should have been meant for him.

His attorney, Jonathan Laidlaw, considered at the time that Baker “would not be able to find work and would have to depend on the charity of others to survive.”

The tennis player, who denied all charges against him, was acquitted of 20 other charges, including those referring to the disappearance of his titles. He stated during the session that he did not know their whereabouts.

During the trial, the German confirmed that he still had “a lot” of his sporting rewards, but that some of them had disappeared.

He has already sold part of his prize money at auction for £700,000. As the former tennis player himself explained, the bankruptcy and his treatment in the media hurt the “Baker brand”.

In the past, he has also had problems with the Spanish courts for unpaid debts related to some work on his home in Mallorca and also with the Swiss courts for not paying the priest he married to in 2009.

In 2002, German courts sentenced him to two years in prison, suspended, and a fine of €500,000 for €1.7 million in late payments of his taxes.