Boris Becker could be facing jail after being investigated over his tax affairs. The German state is close to finishing its five-year investigation into the 33-year-old tennis star’s financial situation, and the bill for the former Wimbledon champion’s unpaid taxes, interest, fines and legal costs, is expected to reach £13.3 million.
Had it not been for one of Boris’ fans, perhaps the German Treasury would not have been able to mount such an in-depth investigation. Hans Gerd was an avid collector of Boris’s press cuttings, and his files were so detailed that the German Tennis Federation took him on as its official archivist. However, the 210 scrapbooks were taken by the Finance Ministry in Munich. “They were invaluable in telling us where Mr Becker was on any given day,” a source there said.
One of the problems is said to lie with Boris’ domicile arrangements. For four years in the 1990s, Boris claimed Monte Carlo as his main residence, while he earned megabucks on the international tennis circuit. He was, however, allegedly spending more than the three months each year that he was entitled to spend in Germany, to avoid paying supertax. The father of two, who recently divorced his wife Barbara, and was named as the father of a Russian model’s love child, made an estimated £140 million from playing and promoting tennis, but it is thought that he spent much of that on his jet-set lifestyle.
There is speculation that, should Boris be hit with a large fine, he may have problems paying it. His internet company, Sportgate, is virtually bankrupt and, as well as Barbara’s divorce settlement, he is paying palimony to Angela Ermakova, the model with whom he had a brief tryst in a broom cupboard at London restaurant Nobu.
A precedent for a jail term for this kind of offence was set in 1997, when Peter Graf, the father of Boris’ fellow tennis champion Steffi, was sentenced to three years and nine months in 1997. German magazine Der Spiegel has said: “Theoretically, for a sum of this size, they would be thinking of a prison term.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
