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 with the Blues, Mathieu Valbuena, in the part of the “sextape” case. More than a month after the trial, which was 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.
“This judgment is scandalous and it was written before the debates took place, it is obvious, reacted Me Sylvain Cormier, lawyer for Mr. Benzema, after the reading of the judgment by the president, Christophe Morgan. The motivation is perfectly contradictory: the court recognizes that Mr. Benzema was not informed of the preliminary negotiations to finally condemn him by affirming without proof that he could not not have known. “
“It’s a legal trap: we followed the crazy logic of the accusation, add Me Cormier. This gives the impression that Karim Benzema had to be paid in spite of the law and the facts. Finally, we use the absence of Karim Benzema to break it down publicly during the debates and deliberation when the court had given us a blank check as to his absence. So there is deception. It is disloyal. “
“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.
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