Two months after the judgment in the Mathieu Valbuena sextape case, 230,000 euros were deducted from Karim Benzema’s bank account, AFP learned on Thursday. This is the sum to which the French striker had been ordered to pay his former teammate in the France team by the court of Versailles.
At the end of November, Karim Benzema was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 75,000 euros for complicity in the attempted blackmail against Mathieu Valbuena. The tricolor striker and the four other defendants had also been ordered to jointly pay the sum of 150,000 euros to the former OM player in compensation for moral damage. A conviction accompanied by a provisional execution.
But that’s not all. The player trained in Lyon, who had appealed against this conviction, had also been ordered to reimburse the legal costs of the civil party, i.e. the sum of 80,000 euros. And as he did not pay the 230,000 euros requested by Valbuena under the civil action, the defense of the latter had this sum seized, via a bailiff, from Benzema’s French bank account at the end of last week, causing a partial blocking of this account.
“These are logical consequences of the decision to pay immediately. We asked for an amicable payment which never happened, so we went to the next step”, indicated to AFP Me Paul-Albert Iweins, counsel for Mathieu Valbuena, while the defense of Karim Benzema, who had expressed his “anger”, saying he was “stunned” by a “very severe, unjust and unproven sentence” at the time of the judgment, had asked to place this sum of 230,000 euros in sequestration pending trial on appeal.
In his judgment, the president of the Versailles criminal court had estimated that Karim Benzema, absent from the debates, had “personally involved, at the cost of subterfuge and lies, to convince his teammate to submit to the blackmail” of which he was the victim in the fall of 2015. Faced with the extent of this affair, Karim Benzema had been excluded from the France team for more than five years before he made his big comeback last summer for the Euro.