>The six-time Grand Slam champion told reporters outside court he would not be commenting on the verdict.
>He was found guilty of transferring hundreds of thousands of pounds from his business account after his bankruptcy, failing to declare a property in Germany, and concealing €825,000 of debt.
>He could face a jail sentence carrying a maximum term of seven years for each count.
Not disclosing your full debt to some of your creditors in bankruptcy proceedings could serve as - false - reassurance that you're good for the money you owe them, especially if the debt you are hiding is already collaterised against some of your assets. Simply put, the more creditors there are, the more difficult it will be for each one of them to get their money back from you when you file for bankruptcy, especially with regards to debt that isn't collaterised.
Say you have a finca in Majorca that's on a 75-percent bank loan. If your creditors don't know that three-fourths of it effectively belong to a bank, it could deceive them into thinking their money is safe with you in a bankruptcy, and keep them from pursuing their demands more aggressively for fear of getting nothing or at least not the full amount back from you.
Didn't Tommy Robinson hide money when he went bankrupt by having a sham divorce? Also, Katie Price seems to go bankrupt every other week and it doesn't cause her any problems.
What a fall from grace. He was a massive celebrity in Germany but like a lottery winner he's clearly frittered away his millions and fucked up. I can see how being in the lime light could convince him to be financially invincible (and if he wasn't personally handling his money, he certainly did get some terrible advice). There's a point, though, where if you control >£10millions you have to be a daftie to be taken advantage off like this. Which if your skill is hitting a ball, may be true.
>There's a point, though, where if you control >£10millions you have to be a daftie to be taken advantage off like this. Which if your skill is hitting a ball, may be true.
It happens a lot when people get rich off a particular talent instead of sheer business acumen. Alan Sugar or Richard Branson will probably never go broke, and likely won't get in trouble with tax authorities, because they built their empires on the back of their talent as businessmen.
But if your multi-million net worth stems from a career as an athlete, singer or actor and you don't have much of a grasp of finances, then there's a much greater danger that you'll simply get used to the massive stream of income you generate in your heyday and lose track of your spending entirely even when your best days are behind you.
At one point, Michael Jackson was the best-paid singer of all time, with a record net worth in the early 90s of roughly 1.5 billion dollars. Back then, that was insane money for somebody in the music industry. But then when subsequent albums and projects saw waning success and he didn't control his spending, he slowly but surely ran himself broke. He would spend more money on a whim on a day out than you and I will see in a year or two. All the kiddie fiddling also didn't help with his income situation. The This Is It Tour would have been his chance to get out of debt, which by that time had reached several hundred million dollars.
I have to say I'm slightly disappointed. Two and a half years, with probable automatic release after 15 months, is a bit of a slap on the wrist for fraudulently mishandling millions during bankruptcy proceedings.
A bit silly getting locked up for a crime that didn't hurt anyone. A suspended sentence would have been better, with some community work. How much does it cost the taxpayers to keep someone locked up?
>>38341 Would you agree it is a dumb way of dealing with crimes that don't hurt people? Community service would be much better. I started looking into it, but apparently it will cost around £40k to keep someone imprisoned for a year.
>A bit silly getting locked up for a crime that didn't hurt anyone
Hiding assets during a bankruptcy suit can directly harm your creditors' chances of getting their money back from you. Personal bankruptcy, with good reason, means that you have to disclose every penny that is in your name, so it can go towards paying off your debt. In that respect, the law generally puts the interests of your creditors above your own. If that weren't the case, I don't think many people would be able to get loans at all. Alternatively, just don't borrow money, if it puts you in a position where you'd be living beyond your means.
Having read up on Becker's case, apparently his problem was that despite an estimated €50m of lifetime earnings from his athletic career as well as endorsements and ad campaigns, and with a peak net worth at some point in the 90s of about €100m, he was very simply bad with money. He tried his hand numerous times at being a business person, having bought three very profitable Mercedes dealerships in Germany and leaving them ailing before selling them in 2017, as well as a hodgepodge conglomerate of companies and entities employing hundreds of people. None of it saw lasting positive returns, and most of them were cash-devouring money pits.
What could have been a veritable business empire ultimately failed because it was run by a former professional athlete who left school after his GCSEs. Not saying that that's setting you up for failure in the business world, but he didn't even have experience running a chip shop before delving head-first into multi-million euro business ventures. What then compounded his predicament was an expensive divorce from his wife twenty years ago, and in more recent times, his lavish standard of living. Besides having to pay alimony for various children from previous relationships and being a generous giver to them, he was living in a rented flat in London at £22K a month and pissing away money for this, that, and the other.
That's how he got here. To then make it ten times worse by playing silly buggers with the Insolvency Act is still on another level.
I don't get it honestly, you have to be a bit dense on top of that surely. I dropped out of college twice and didn't even think of attending uni, but if I came into that sort of money I would still have the sense to just get a decent financial advisor to whack it all in a load of shares, then live happily on the dividends.
Well, besides being a bit thick and ill-prepared for wealth, there's another obvious culprit: Greed. 50m Eurobux would set anyone up for life extremely comfortably. The trouble is it's never enough for some people.
> I would still have the sense to just get a decent financial advisor
I guess that's just it, he was blaming it all on his advisors and tried to make it look like he was completely clueless about the fact that they had led him to commit bankruptcy fraud.
Maybe with him it's a mixture of being a bit thick and having if not disrespect, then certainly a good bit of ignorance towards UK law as a foreigner. Then again, I can't imagine bankruptcy laws in Germany being vastly different from ours. And being convicted of tax evasion twenty years ago in Germany should have heightened his senses enough to make sure he'd never run into legal trouble like that again.
I actually have a business degree. I'm not the sort of person who would enjoy being at the helm of turning a €100m personal fortune into a business conglomerate (I would probably just put it into low-risk passive income vehicles and do fuck all every day for the rest of my life with the annual payout). But one thing you do learn about in business school at length is our tax system and also how to handle a bankruptcy, both business and personal. Can't say I've needed that knowledge so far, thankfully, but I would say I've got a solid understanding of what practices you need to avoid if you don't want to get nicked for dodgy finances, even after you've run yourself broke.
>Well, besides being a bit thick and ill-prepared for wealth, there's another obvious culprit: Greed. 50m Eurobux would set anyone up for life extremely comfortably. The trouble is it's never enough for some people.
Also very true. That kind of wealth means that if you're smart, you'll never have money worries again. All you need to do is shut up that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that you need to turn it into more.
Smart maybe isn't the right term. But you know. Just smart enough not to immediately spunk it up the wall. I'd imagine the more money you have, the easier it becomes to spend it very fucking quickly, and the numbers involved are daft enough that it's easy to lose track.
If you lived a mostly normal life and just bought yourself a nice house, nice car, and went on a nice (but decidedly normal) holiday every so often, you'd never have to worry at all. But that isn't what people do, instead they'll go cruise the med in their own personal yacht, fly all over in a private jet, and generally just LARP at being a Bill Gates or a Rothschild bastard, and wipe it out over the course of just a few years.
Why didn't he just become a BTL landlord? So many questions. I don't think the excuse that he is dumb is good enough. I bet he thought he was Lex Luthor and splashed money at everything.
He paid out £1.5m in a child support settlement after shagging a waitress behind a sushi restaurant. This is not a man who is good at making decisions, even decisions like "Should I ejaculate in a complete stranger?".
£22K a month still only adds up to £264K a year. Even at zero interest, with 50 million euros, near enough £42m at the current exchange rate, he could have spent close to a million quid a year and still never would have seen the day he'd gone broke from it. When you consider how much of their monthly income ordinary people like you and me spend on a rented flat (if they're too thick to get on the property ladder), then a quarter of your annual spending in the one-million-a-year scenario really doesn't seem unsound.
Whatever house he was renting at £22K/month, he probably could have bought outright for something less than £5m. Which, if he still had that kind of money to spend at the time he moved in a few years ago, probably would have been the smarter choice, especially with the way the property market has been going. But there we go again with him making smart financial choices.
The skills that made him rich are totally unrelated to the skills required to stay rich. In financial terms, successful athletes are more like lottery winners than business people. I suspect that when fame and wealth come early and quickly in your life, it's easy to fall into the mindset that you're invincible. You don't have to worry about how much things cost or the consequences of your actions, until one day it all catches up with you and everything comes crashing down.
>>38354 >a rented flat (if they're too thick to get on the property ladder)
Beautiful. Absolutely outstanding. I hope there wasn't any more to say about Boris Becker, because that ship has sailed now.
I wasn't talking about the pauper who smokes fags in front of his 40'' TV all day long.
Even with ballooned property prices in recent years, there are still ways to be middle class and get on the property ladder if you have a halfway decent double income.
>The skills that made him rich are totally unrelated to the skills required to stay rich. In financial terms, successful athletes are more like lottery winners than business people.
Very true. There are many ways in life that you can come into shitloads of money and it not really being the result of outstanding business acumen. Loads of lottery winners really don't do well at all a few years down the road from their win.
>He was also unable to fully repay £1.2m, with a 25 per cent interest rate, that he borrowed in 2014 from British businessman John Caudwell, who founded Phones 4u.
>During the bankruptcy trial, the court also heard he owed Swiss authorities five million francs (£4m) and separately just under €1m in liabilities over a 2002 conviction for tax evasion and attempted tax evasion in Germany.
>He said he also had to support his daughter Anna Ermakova and her mother Angela Ermakova, in a deal which included a £2.5m Chelsea flat.
Even for a former athlete with fuck all of a clue about finances, that's pretty much pro level.
It's a bit kicking somebody when they're down. Cauldwell has tripled his money since 2014. That is provided that Becker actually paid him the £300K annual interest and it hasn't run him further into debt.
Usury of that magnitude is often walking a thin line. High interest rates like that are meant to insure against your risk of lending money to somebody who is struggling and has a high probability of defaulting (besides maybe deterring them from taking out a loan in the first place), but £300K annual interest, excluding repayment, can be so crippling to a debtor that that alone will cause them to default. You will then have ruined that person's life and it's iffy if you get your money back during insolvency, because struggling as they are, they will likely have spent it all, and other physical assets will probably already have been factored in as collateral for other loans.
If Becker took the offer, then either he was already going massively tits up in 2014 and no bank would lend him money, or he again simply doesn't have a clue about finances.
>>38364 Anyone who took that deal thought they were pulling a fast one somehow and to be that fucked to have no choice and to even need that much money that urgently in the first place you have already fucked over and let down a lot of people, some of them will be fucked themselves with no dream of ever accessing the lines of credit Becker could squander through "star power " alone.
It's easy to have a go at lenders but what Becker does for the average borrower is the equivalent of what vandals, drink-drivers etc do for the average insurance policy holder. Fuck him.
Private loans are never a good idea. And not just because you may be paying extortionate interest on them. They also tend to ruin friendships if you're in any way close to the would-be lender.
But not being able to repay £1.2m when your net worth at one point used to be 100 million euros is just human tragedy. Not saying it can't happen to the best of us, but to get to a point where you just blew through 100 million and can't repay a loan of 1.5 percent that, interest or no, you're either a cocaine addict with a heavy habit or you simply never should have been allowed to handle your own finances.
They're saying he lost £10m by investing in Nigerian oil wells.
Did he not know that all those e-mails from imprisoned Nigerian princes are fake?
But cheap laughs aside, that deal was apparently shilled by one of Becker's aides who was Nigerian. The fact that he invested such a large chunk of his already dwindling fortune in a country with rampant corruption and political instability at all levels shows that he was really out of his depth handling his money.
That does bring up an angle I hadn't considered before actually. If I were to just inherit 50 million quid out of the blue one day off of my long lost great uncle Laurence Cholmondley-Cribbingsworth's vast rural estate, would I know who to turn to and actually be able to trust with investing that money safely?
It's easy for me to talk out of my arse here about hiring a financial adviser and going to an investment broker and what have you, but I think the reality is more likely I'd suddenly become extremely paranoid everyone was out to scam me out of my newfound wealth, because let's face it, a great deal of people would be out to scam me out of my newfound wealth.
I'm sure Hargreaves Landsdown are a very reputable business, but is phoning them up and saying "Hello, yes, I just inherited fifty million quid, what do I do with it?" painting a target on your forehead, the same way taking your car to the garage and saying "I don't know anything about cars, but it's making a funny noise, fix it please?" is?
Once you have over a certain amount of money, many of the investment, banking, loan protections that us paupers have fly out the window - in the UK, different banks have different limits, but the one I used to work for was you earn over £300k per year and/or have £3m in liquid assets, you're treated as a professional investor and not so much as a private individual.
So when you're at that level, you go to a thing called a Private Bank, and they look after you. Obviously because you're now a professional investor, they can sell you almost any financial product or investment they like, they don't have to read you all the terms and conditions, you don't have to sign all the papers, or get any of the protections that you or I would get. Target acquired.
I guess there's somewhat of a fine line between recommending a slightly dodgy investment to a large account holder, and investment fraud.
>Obviously because you're now a professional investor
They're sitting ducks because from having rubbed shoulders with their likes both professionally (not a banker) and leisurely, my perception is that there's often plenty of hubris involved there. They think that because they for some reason have (single-digit) millions to their name, investment mistakes don't happen to them. It's normally just daytraders on Wallstreetbets who succumb to the delusion that they're the next Warren Buffet just because a heavily leveraged trade improbably goes their way, but small-time millionaires like that can almost as easily gamble much of it away.
