For Karim Benzema, the burden is tough. The Versailles criminal court recognized, Wednesday, November 24, the striker of the France team guilty of the offense of “complicity in attempted blackmail”, in 2015, on his ex-teammate at the Blues, Mathieu Valbuena, in the part of the “sextape” case. More than a month after the trial held in the absence of the Real Madrid star, Karim Benzema was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence and a € 75,000 fine. He will also have to pay 80,000 euros to Mathieu Valbuena by virtue of non-pecuniary damage.
The court went beyond the requisitions of the prosecution, which had called for a ten-month suspended prison sentence for the star of the Blues, returned in June to selection after more than five years of banishment. Lawyers for the player said their client will appeal and come in person “To explain” on the occasion of this new hearing.
“Obviously, his absence [lors de l’audience d’octobre] counted ”, lamented Me Antoine Vey. “We are in the distortion of the facts, a truncated or even faked presentation of the facts. According to the adage, justice has its reasons that reason ignores “, reacted Me Sylvain Cormier after the reading of the judgment by the president, Christophe Morgan. “This sentence seems logical in view of the file and the hearing”, assures, for his part, Me Paul-Albert Iweins, Mathieu Valbuena’s lawyer.
Zouaoui, “brain” of the operation
This last “Suffered direct pressure during training [en octobre 2015], from an accomplice of the blackmailers, a member like him of the France team and whose notoriety dissuaded him from immediately revealing the pressures ”, and “Has been excluded from the French football team and international competitions since 2016”, recalled Mr Morgan.
The other defendants were all found guilty. Axel Angot, who stole Mathieu Valbuena’s telephone data in 2014 and kept the intimate video filmed by the player, was found guilty of “breach of trust” and “attempted blackmail”: he was sentenced to a convertible sentence of two years in prison.
” Brain “ of the attempted blackmail on Mr. Valbuena, Mustapha Zouaoui was sentenced to two and a half years in prison “With warrant of arrest and committal” and a fine of 3,000 euros. The intermediary, Younes Houass, was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison sentence. As for Karim Zenati, the childhood friend of Karim Benzema, in “State of recurrence”, he was sentenced to an adaptable sentence of fifteen months in prison and a fine of 3,000 euros for “attempted blackmail”.
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