Boris Becker, the three-time Wimbledon champion, returned to his home country of Germany on Thursday after he was freed from prison in Britain, his lawyer said. Mr. Becker, 55, was sentenced to prison after he was found guilty of four charges under the Insolvency Act in Britain, where he had lived since 2012.
The Southwark Crown Court in London sentenced Mr. Becker to 30 months in prison in April for hiding his assets after he was declared bankrupt.
After Mr. Becker was declared bankrupt in June 2017, he was legally obligated to disclose all of his assets so they could be used to pay his creditors. The London court found in April that he had concealed, failed to disclose and removed assets, including a loan of 825,000 euros (around $875,000) and property valued at €426,930.90 (around $453,000), according to Britain’s Insolvency Service.
As he tried to fend off creditors, Mr. Becker made an unsuccessful bid for diplomatic immunity from the British courts in 2018, after the Central African Republic had in April of that year named him as its attaché to the European Union for sports, culture and humanitarian affairs.
Mr. Becker’s lawyer, Christian-Oliver Moser, said in a statement that the former tennis player left for Germany after he was released from prison. “Thus, he has served his sentence and is not subject to any restrictions in Germany,” Mr. Moser said.
Neither Mr. Becker’s lawyer nor the British authorities said whether he had been ordered to leave the country.
“Any foreign national who is convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence is considered for deportation at the earliest opportunity,” the Home Office, which oversees immigration in Britain, said in a statement.
Under Britain’s Early Removal Scheme, foreign nationals who are imprisoned in Britain and are subject to deportation can be removed from the country up to 12 months before they would have otherwise been eligible for release. From 2020 to 2021, the Home Office removed more than 1,100 people under this program.
This wasn’t Becker’s first brush with the law. Nearly two decades earlier, in 2002, Mr. Becker was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined nearly $300,000 after being found guilty of income tax evasion in Munich.
The court battles followed a stellar career in tennis. In 1985, Mr. Becker, then 17 years old, became the youngest champion in the history of men’s singles at Wimbledon. He won six Grand Slam titles, including three at Wimbledon, before he retired from tennis in 1999. He was a frequent commentator for the BBC at Wimbledon, though he was called “underwhelming” and a “master of the self-evident” in that role, but has coached Novak Djokovic, a 21-time Grand Slam singles champion, for three seasons, with great success. It is still unclear what Becker plans to do in Germany.
