The trial of Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and her ex-husband begins for confiscation of assets

Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and her ex-husband Josep Santacana face a trial today accused of an alleged crime of confiscation of assets. Since this Tuesday, the criminal court number 25 of Barcelona has been judging the former tennis player and her ex-husband, for whom the Prosecutor's Office is asking for four years in prison accused of hatching a plan to decapitalize their assets and avoid paying a debt to the Bank of Luxembourg.

The trial, which is scheduled to last until Friday the 15th, comes two years after the public prosecutor's office accused both of them of a crime of criminal asset seizure or insolvency.

In its qualifications, the Prosecutor's Office maintained that Sánchez Vicario, "under the instructions" of her ex-husband and in collaboration with five other defendants, "devised a plan consisting of decapitalizing their numerous assets" to avoid the debt they had with the Bank of Luxembourg.

This entity had filed a complaint against the couple after trying unsuccessfully, since 2010, to collect the amounts with which it guaranteed the tennis player to pay a fine of 5.2 million euros for a previous fraud against the Treasury.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, the accused carried out numerous "maneuvers" with a "spirit of illicit enrichment", among them the emptying of six checking accounts, so that there would be no balance in the event of seizure, or the disappearance of the money received by the tennis player as payment. of reports in the media, "charging in an opaque manner or making the money disappear as soon as it is received."

The accusation also includes the execution of a real estate de-patrimonialization process "through companies of which the former athlete was the real or fiduciary owner", carried out, "under the guidelines of the accused", in more than a dozen homes, several parking spaces, a place in a marina or several pieces of land, among other real estate.

For everything, the Prosecutor's Office requests to convict both of 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 euros in civil liability; and three and a half years in prison and a fine of 7,560 euros for the accomplices.