Dani Alves will be able to leave prison after spending 14 months behind bars once he has paid the million euro bail imposed on him yesterday by the Barcelona Court. In a resolution notified yesterday, the same court that sentenced the footballer to four and a half years in prison for rape decided to release him until the sentence is final and all possibility of appeal is exhausted, a procedure that can take years.
Courts of justice give priority to appeals in cases involving prisoners, but now with Alves free the ruling on the allegations may be delayed. With his release, the case enters a new dimension pending appeals to modify or maintain the sentence. If ratified, the footballer would have to go to prison again to finish serving the rest of the sentence.
The footballer’s lawyers and advisers worked hard to collect the money and get him out of prison yesterday. They were supposed to deposit them in court before 2:30 p.m., but they didn’t make it in time. So, presumably, the footballer will leave Brians 2 penitentiary today and the court will have to summon him to personally notify him of the release decision, hand over his passports, inform him of the address where he will reside and indicate the court where ‘he will have to present every week to sign and certify that he has not escaped.
Alves’ advisors turned to Neymar’s father again to get the funds to pay the bail, as La Vanguardia reported yesterday. It is the same way that they already used to pay the 150,000 euros that was required by the court of inquiry to compensate the victim of the rape and that served as a mitigating factor to reduce the sentence considering that he had repaired the damage. Alves has all assets seized due to open court proceedings with his ex-wife and mother of his children in Brazil which prevents him from being able to attend to the payment, so Neymar’s father made himself available to help him bear the costs of the legal proceedings while he had the immobilized assets.
Another of the ways that the footballer could have resorted to is the money that the Treasury must return to him after having won several proceedings at the National Court thanks to the appeals presented by his tax lawyer, Fernando Mota Bosch, from the BDO office lawyers According to sources close to the Tax Agency, yesterday the Treasury gave the representatives of Alves a certificate with the execution of two sentences and which the footballer could use as a guarantee of payment before the court to be released. The execution of these judgments amounts to 6.8 million euros.
Legally, the decision of the court was not unanimous and the three magistrates of the court agreed on the release of Alves, although one of them dissented in a private vote on the existence of the risk of escape. The two magistrates consider that the probability of the footballer evading the action of justice “has decreased” after the sentence they imposed was lower than what the accusations claimed for him. The Prosecutor’s Office asked for nine years, and the victim’s lawyer, 12. And that’s why they see it as enough to ensure his permanence in Spain by withdrawing his passport, forcing him to appear in court once a week and also imposing he is forbidden to approach the victim less than a kilometer away. The dissenting magistrate, Luis Belestá, on the other hand, considers that the risk of flight has increased after being convicted and because of the possibility that the sentence “could be increased” if the appeals presented by the Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecution are accepted particular
This magistrate was in favor of keeping Alves in pre-trial detention until half of the sentence, which is the maximum limit established by law. In this case, it would be after two years and three months, which would have left thirteen months to reach the deadline, during which time the footballer would have been behind bars.
