Boris Becker is back in the news cycle these days as he does back-to-back interviews to promote his new autobiography, Inside, in which he has recounted his eight months behind the bars. Becker, a six-time Grand Slam champion, won his first Wimbledon at the age of 17 and was marked for greatness from that point on. But his off-field antics dominated the headlines just as much as his exploits on the court. This included the time he spent eight months in a London prison for hiding £2.5m worth of assets and loans to avoid paying debts. He was released in 2023 and deported from the UK.
One of the most bizarre moments from Becker’s brush with the law came in 2018, when the tennis legend was facing bankruptcy proceedings in the UK but tried to escape from them by claiming diplomatic immunity.
How, you ask?
The tennis star reportedly tried to use his role as the Central African Republic’s attaché for sports, culture and humanitarian affairs to the European Union. Becker’s lawyers, according to an article in The Guardian, tried to claim that Becker’s position qualified for diplomatic immunity because it was covered by the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The law firm representing the tennis ace said that the Vienna Convention’s regulations meant that Becker could not be made subject to any legal process without the consent of the Central African Republic and the foreign secretary.
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But before Becker could escape through the legal loophole, there came a catch. Two top officials in the Central African Republic government spoke out about the legitimacy of the passport given to to the tennis legend and the role itself.
Cherubin Moroubama, a top diplomat in the Central African Republic Foreign Ministry, told French news agency Agence-France Presse that the job profile on Becker’s passport, “financial charge de mission,” does not exist.
“The diplomatic passport that he has is a fake,” Moroubama said before pointing out that the document’s serial number corresponded to one of a batch of passports stolen in 2014.
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AFP said the passport in question, of which the news agency had seen a copy, was dated 19 March 2018 but had not been stamped or signed by the country’s foreign minister, Charles Armel Doubane.
Doubane also claimed that the passport was a forgery and that the signature on it was not his.
But this was where the plot thickened as Becker continued to claim that the passport was legit. This led to a counter investigation from the reputed German news agency Deutsche Welle, which found a certificate that bore the signature of Central African Republic’s EU envoy, Daniel Emery Dede, which confirmed the tennis star’s version that he was appointed by the Central African Republic (CAR) as an attache.
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