Dani Alves set to be freed from jail after stumping up €1m bail

Dani Alves will be released from prison this Monday despite being sentenced to four and a half years in prison for a sexual assault on a girl in the Sutton nightclub on 31 December 2022 in Barcelona. The ruling considers it proven that he violently penetrated the woman, whose lawyers were asking for 12 years in prison. The prosecution was asking for nine. In the end, the sentence was halved due to a payment of 150,000 euros provided by Neymar's father, which served as an extenuating circumstance for the reparation of the damage.

The former player's release on bail was managed thanks to a payment of one million euros, which took him several days to collect. His main obstacle to this was that his accounts in Brazil are frozen due to a lawsuit with his ex-wife. To solve it, he got in touch again with the father of his friend Neymar to help him, but it was not possible, so he waited for the Treasury to return money owed to him for reasons in which, in the end, the former footballer has proved in court that he was right. Thus, the Tax Agency provided him with 6.8 million this week.

The newspaper 'El Pais' gives the details of the departure of the Brazilian from the penitentiary centre of Brians 2, which is located in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, in Barcelona. The prisoner has been there for 14 months and, now, he faces the possible 24 months it could take for the sentence that has fallen on him to become final away from the bars. He will have to report weekly to the provincial court, to which he must hand over his two passports, the Spanish one and the one from his native country.

The main impediment to his release was the flight risk that the justice system saw in him. With the million euros and the obligation not to leave Spain that this relaxation of his punishment entails, the system is happy to grant him his freedom as long as he does not come within one kilometre of the victim and does not try to communicate with her. Criticism has quickly multiplied: basically, it is no longer considered possible for him to flee for the mere fact of paying one million euros when lawyers are aware that he has just received 6.8 million euros.

 

March 25, 2024