Today, Tuesday, September 12, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and José Santacana, separated since 2018 but still married until a court ruling puts an end to the anomaly, appear in Criminal Court No. 25 of Barcelona. Before them they have the same ominous reality: a request for a four-year prison sentence for both and compensation of 6.6 million euros. On the other side, the prosecutor’s office and the plaintiff, Banque de Louxembourg (BDL).
This past Sunday, El País published an interview with the Roland Garros champion, who confessed to being scared in the face of one with very serious consequences. Arantxa explains how unfair it is to make ends meet with hardships, having been a millionaire. She won a lot playing tennis and today, of that fortune, nothing remains. Based in Miami, half of her salary as a tennis teacher and of her income from her collaborations as a commentator in different tournaments are seized. Also her earnings as an Olympic medalist. But the debt that the European entity demands from it is huge and those crumbs barely cover its interests, whose figure continues to grow. Arantxa shifts the responsibility for her poor accounting status to José Santacana, “with whom she should never have fallen in love,” she says, admitting that she receives financial help from some friends to get ahead. The story that she opened in the magazine Hello! After separating from her he reached her zenith. Today, José Santacana speaks for La Vanguardia.
“I was stupid: I should have spoken before but I am not from this world and… In short, one learns the hard way,” explains Arantxa Sánchez Vicario’s ex. Stunned by the interview granted two days before and a few hours before the oral hearing began, Santacana dismantles his story, one volley after another: “That thing about friends lending him money… do you believe it? We are talking about a person who defrauded the Treasury, who said that she had only gone to Andorra to decorate the house, that she did not sign agreements because she was in love, that when we separated ‘I left her’ with 2,500 or 3,000 euros a month, all to make people sad, when I have the transcript of a hearing in the US acknowledging that she earns between 200 and 300 thousand a year… I understand that the media supports her for being who she is, while I am the idiot on duty. But let it be clear: I came into his life when nothing could prevent the Luxembourg bomb from exploding. The mistake was not falling in love with me, but not telling his family when it was due. The mistake was not paying the Treasury.”
Arantxa married José Santacana in September 2008. Ten months later, the Supreme Court confirmed the ruling of the National Court stating that the tennis player had to pay the Treasury 3.5 million plus interest for tax evasion. That debt is the origin of the cause that now concerns us. The economic expert report presented by the BDL in the case estimates the value of the real estate and financial assets in the name of Arantxa Sánchez Vicario at 13,946,000 million euros, distributed between Spain, Andorra and Switzerland, before the decapitalization process. And that practically all of this was liquidated to transfer its value to accounts in the US in the name of several companies, some linked to José Santacana. The bank maintains that Arantxa’s ex intervened and managed several fund movement operations.
Santacana denies the biggest one: “I have not managed his assets, I gave him advice to try to get liquidity from him. But I have not done anything wrong nor do I have that money that the bank demands. I’m going to trial and I want the truth to be known. She presents herself as irresponsible for her actions: now she blames me but before she was already bad with her family for that same reason. She imagines that we went to trial as a married couple, holding hands and there was no collection of assets but it was not possible to pay, the culprits would be her relatives. They have searched for a culprit while she tries to close a deal. She is not stupid: she knows a lot about giving grief and crying, so much so that in the end, the fool here is me.”
Juan Segarra, an associate at the Molins Defensa Penal law firm, is the lawyer who will defend José Santacana in this process. This is how it is explained to this newspaper: “Arantxa Sánchez Vicario was the recipient of the proceeds from the sale of the real estate assets that the Bank of Luxembourg (BDL) denounces as an asset seizure. Not everything, since there were debts to settle, mortgages, embargoes, payments to lawyers and various expenses, but in any case, nothing ended up in my client’s pockets. We will prove through documentation that the final figure, about three million euros, went to an off-shore company based in Panama of which Arantxa is the owner, a point that, naturally, we have documented.”
The BDL could not collect funds in Arantxa’s name that existed in an account in Switzerland, as they disappeared when her father, Emilio Sánchez, managed her interests. A bad investment in Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme could explain part of the volatilization but not its total, between 10 or 12 million euros, says Segarra.
Santacana summarizes almost ten years of litigation this way: “I don’t have to justify where all his fortune is, those 30 million that he earned in his career distributed in different accounts and companies. And there is money that has not been found in life. Anyway: the bank asks him to pay off the debt, his family tells him that there is no money and I, as a husband, find myself with a hot potato: five good real estate properties but loaded with mortgages, liens, maintenance expenses, legal expenses to face in Switzerland and Andorra, etc. Well, once those expenses were settled, about three million are clear… and from there he still took out almost two million to buy a penthouse in Miami, the one in the Paraíso Bay development. A property that he later sold in 2019, which we have documented and will contribute to the trial.”
Santacana explains that Arantxa tried to gradually pay off the debt with the BDL as the properties were sold but that the entity did not accept the proposal: “He met with the bank up to two times but they wanted him to pay the full amount, the 5.2 million debt, yes or yes. They did not accept a haircut or a payment plan and there was never five million at a time, because everything was sold in several years,” recalls the tennis player’s ex, giving her a, perhaps, final cape.
