The trial against the former tennis player and her ex-husband, Josep Santacana, begins in Barcelona this Tuesday morning, the 12th. The Prosecutor’s Office is asking for four years in prison for them for an alleged crime of stealing assets by allegedly hiding their assets through a front man in order to avoid paying the Bank of Luxembourg a debt of 7.5 million euros. The process will continue until Friday the 15th in Criminal Court 25.
In the Prosecutor’s Office brief, to which Europa Press has had access, it is detailed that Arantxa Sánchez Vicario acted “under her husband’s instructions” once she was notified of the debt claim in July 2010.
He assures that the Bank of Luxembourg advanced to a Spanish bank the money that the tennis player had to pay to settle her debt with the Treasury, an amount that the Luxembourg bank demanded from her and which amounts to 7.5 million with interest.
To avoid paying that debt, the prosecutor maintains that both “devised a plan consisting of decapitalizing their assets” and emptied their checking accounts. They made the money that Sánchez Vicario had collected in loans and for reports “disappear.” The prosecutor states that the tennis player was the owner and beneficiary of at least five companies and the owner of several real estate properties that, after being notified of the debt with the Treasury, became in the name of a Uruguayan company.
For everything, the Prosecutor’s Office requests to convict them for an alleged crime of confiscation of assets or punishable insolvency: it demands four years in prison and 8,640 euros in fines for Sánchez Vicario and Santacana, in addition to 6.1 million in civil liability.