Wednesday, December 1st, 2021
“Must be satisfied”
Professional boxer Sturm achieves detention reduction
Felix Sturm’s revision is successful. The professional boxer still has to be in custody, but not as long as initially judged. Tax offenses, doping and bodily harm remain a fact, but not the amount of tax damage.
Professional boxer Felix Sturm does not have to go to jail for as long as initially ordered. In an appeal hearing, the Cologne district court reduced the original sentence for tax evasion, attempted tax evasion and violation of the doping law with willful bodily harm from three years imprisonment to two years and four months. “You have to be satisfied with the result. That is eight months less imprisonment,” said Sturm when asked after the verdict was pronounced. He had already spent nine months in custody in 2019.
The presiding judge had spoken in the grounds of the judgment of “seriously deviating statements” compared to the first judgment from April 2020. At that time, the regional court had found a tax loss of around one million euros, which the judgment that has now been given corrected it down to around 680,000 euros.
“From the originally accused ten million euros of evaded taxes, around 680,000 euros remained in the end,” said defender Nils Kröber. Sturm, whose real name is Adnan Catic, was arrested in April 2019 and faced with charges of evading ten million euros in taxes. The prosecution then put his tax liability at 5.8 million euros.
The 42-year-old boxer had been in custody until just before Christmas 2019 and was released after paying bail. Sturm had appealed against the ruling issued in April 2020 to the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). This referred back to the regional court for renegotiation.
The BGH, however, left the findings of the first judgment on tax evasion in 2008 and 2009 as well as on attempted tax evasion in 2013 unobjectionable, as did the decision to violate the Anti-Doping Act in the act of deliberate bodily harm. Sturm had fought the Russian Fyodor Tschudinow in February 2016 in Oberhausen with the performance-enhancing drug Stanozolol. As a result, the fight was canceled and Sturm was convicted of willful assault. The verdict is not yet legally binding.