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Spanish tennis star Sánchez Vicario escapes prison over €6.6 million debt

Former world No.1 and four-time Grand Slam winner Arantxa Sanchez Vicario was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence for concealing assets to avoid paying a debt to a bank, the Spanish courts said on Wednesday.

Published: 17 January 2024 15:58 CET
Spanish tennis star Sánchez Vicario escapes prison over €6.6 million debt
Former Spanish tennis player Arantxa Sánchez Vicario leaves the courthouse in September 2023. (Photo by Pau BARRENA / AFP)

Sánchez Vicario, 52, and her ex-husband Josep Santacana were also ordered to pay €6.6 million to the Luxembourg bank with which they ran up the debt that they tried to avoid paying.

Santacana, who managed Sánchez Vicario’s accounts, was given a longer sentence of three years and three months in prison, Catalonia’s High Court said in a statement following the trial in Barcelona.

Three other defendants were sentenced to one year and three months in prison, plus a fine.

The sentence states that “the defendant… had and has always had sufficient assets to meet her debt and that, by acts of sale and evasion of seizure actions, she had prevented its recovery”.

Sánchez Vicario won three French Open titles as well as the 1994 US Open, spending 12 weeks as world No.1 in 1995.

She was also twice a finalist at the Australian Open and Wimbledon.

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CRIME

Spain seizes 1.8 tonnes of Sinaloa Cartel’s crystal meth

Spanish police said Thursday they had seized 1,800 kilos of crystal meth that Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel was trying to sell in Europe, the country's "biggest-ever seizure" of the narcotic.

Published: 16 May 2024 17:07 CEST
Spain seizes 1.8 tonnes of Sinaloa Cartel's crystal meth

Police arrested five people during the raid in the eastern Alicante province, one of them a Mexican running the cartel’s Spanish operation, a statement said.

“This is the biggest-ever seizure of crystal meth in Spain and the second largest in Europe,” Antonio Martinez Duarte, head of the police’s drug trafficking and organised crime unit, told reporters.

“Among those arrested is a Mexican citizen linked to the Sinaloa Cartel,” he added.

READ ALSO: What are the penalties for drug possession in Spain?

He did not give his name but indicated the suspect was responsible for receiving the narcotics in Spain then distributing them within Europe.

The Sinaloa Cartel is one of Mexico’s oldest, largest and most violent criminal groups whose influence remains strong despite the arrest of its founder Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman and his son.

Both have been extradited to and jailed in the United States.

During the operation, police also detained three Spaniards and a Romanian, seizing five cars, documents, a weapon and cash.

But police believe it was a one-off trafficking operation and that “Mexican organisations are not permanently based” in Spain, Martinez Duarte said.

“These organisations send a trusted person who carries out the operation in line with their interests” and once that is over, he goes back home, he explained.

The seized narcotics had been due to be shipped to central Europe.

Although Spain is one of the main drug gateways to Europe, seizures of synthetic narcotics are uncommon as most traffickers usually deal in cannabis and cocaine.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain’s Europe’s cocaine gateway?

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