Arantxa Sánchez Vicario declared yesterday Tuesday before the head of the Criminal Court No. 25 of Barcelona that during the years in which her accounts and vast real estate assets – distributed between Spain, Andorra and Switzerland – were disappearing through sales to companies that are now in question, she always She let herself be guided by her husband, José Santacana. He was the demiurge of an elaborate plan to sell everything and present an alibi to the legal claim of Banque de Louxembourg (BDL), according to her statement. They have all the information here.
The bank's first attempt to collect the debt incurred by the tennis player dates back to April 2010. That same year a long decapitalization operation began. The first sale occurred a month and a half after the tennis player and her husband went together to a notary to revoke the powers of Emilio Sánchez as manager of her daughter's assets. From that moment, November 2009, she became the absolute owner of her assets and, according to the information provided by BDL to the process, between 2010 and 2016, together with her husband and four front men – also accused –, they sold houses, apartments , farms and mansions. Even so, the tennis player sued her father, her brother Javier, and her lifelong legal team to hold them accountable. Repentance came too late.
Yesterday, his enemy was another: José Santacana. The extenista explained that he was the one who went to the notaries to sign the sales of his real estate assets and the one who received the checks and deposited the resulting amounts into different accounts. He acknowledged before his honor that he was aware that he had done wrong but that he has tried to correct the errors committed by giving BDL just over 1.8 million euros, which he has been able to raise in this time. In any case, blind trust in her husband did not allow her to know the extent of the problem.
The Roland Garros champion did not think the same six, maybe five years ago. Before separating. At the end of her marriage she fought hard to save him. She clung to ten years of love and begged Santacana for “another chance” to rescue the most important relationship in her life and from which her two children were born, the most precious treasure for both of them. The letter in which Arantxa opens her mouth does not have a date or postmark, but her words show that it dates back to the end of 2017: “Thank you for these ten beautiful years together despite the difficulties,” writes the tennis player. That letter, four pages, has been presented in the case as documentary evidence by Santacana's defense, led by lawyer Juan Segarra, from Molins Criminal Defense.
The content of this letter is intimate and heartbreaking, it does not have to see the light of day. Nor influence the development of the process except for one aspect: in one of his paragraphs, and this is important for the matter at hand, Arantxa points out his family as the tares that have put his marriage on the brink of the precipice: “The "We have both been through a lot of things, the culprits have been my family, who have wanted to put an end to us in every way, but they have not succeeded and they are not going to succeed." Arantxa was completely wrong, as we learned in February 2018 when her breakup was made public, definitive and with no turning back. José Santacana has presented this document in the case to ask out loud if Arantxa would implore him to rebuild her relationship from being the vicious manipulator she now claims she is.
