LONDON, 29 Apr. (DPA/EP) –
Former German tennis player Boris Becker, a three-time Wimbledon champion, was sentenced this Friday to two and a half years in prison by a court in London, during his bankruptcy proceedings for the last five years, still pending appeal.
The judges of the London court considered that Becker hid a property in his hometown, Leimen, transferred large sums of money without permission to other accounts and did not declare his participation in an artificial intelligence company and a loan debt.
The prosecution considered it proven that he deliberately hid numerous properties and that Becker blamed the advisers who supposedly took care of his finances. The defense stated that while his client is naive, he is innocent. The jury accepted this argument in 20 of the 24 points presented by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Becker, 54, of London, was declared insolvent by a court on June 21, 2017. After that, he had to declare his entire estate to a bankruptcy administrator. The German earned during his career some 25 million dollars in prize money and, according to his own estimates, a similar sum in advertising.
However, he began to have financial problems that he attributed, among other things, to the expensive divorce of his ex-wife Barbara as well as the maintenance costs of his daughter Anna Ermakova. Becker, who comments on tennis tournaments among others for the BBC, went to court with his partner Lilian De Carvalho Monteiro and his eldest son Noah.