Majorcan villa goes under the hammer for a knockdown price this autumn, even they might begin to wonder whether ‘Boom-boom Boris’ really is going bust.

 

First love: Boris Becker and ex-wife Barbara pictured in 1993

 

Remembering the procession of exotic, identikit beauties towards whom Boris Becker’s roving eye has been fatally drawn down the years, perhaps it is no coincidence that he showed similar tastes when choosing the decor for his sumptuous Majorcan villa.

Built in the late Nineties, as a monument to a glittering career that brought him three Wimbledon titles (the first when he was just 17 years old) but which by then was in terminal decline, the secluded  retreat features a chaotic amalgam of Moroccan, Turkish and European influences.

When the All England Club renovated the old Number One Court, Becker also acquired the original net and supports and installed them on the court at his new bolthole, called Son Coll; a nice little touch that impressed guests at his famously extravagant house parties.

On Wednesday, though, an air of decay hung over this one-time haunt of the beautiful people. Daisies pushed up through lawns once immaculate enough to receive ‘Boom-boom’ Boris’s mighty serve, and a shrugging woman caretaker told me: ‘Mr Becker hasn’t stayed here for a long time. We don’t know when he’ll come again.’

It seems possible that he never will. For that same day, an hour’s drive away in Palma, a judge had ordered the house that Boris built be auctioned off, so that £225,000 of the profits can be set aside to pay a long-standing debt which the 44-year-old German has been ruled to owe a local landscape gardening company. 

Forced to serve up divorce and paternity settlements totalling more than £20 million to his first wife, Barbara, and Angela Ermakova, the Russian model who had his baby after a notorious ‘knee trembler’ on the stairs of a London restaurant, Becker had been trying to sell the villa for five years anyway.

 

According to a local estate agent, his original asking price of £13 million was way over the top for a house of such ‘individual’ design, especially in today’s depressed market. And though he then slashed it to £10 million, there were no takers.

Humiliatingly, however, on the advice of a valuation expert the Palma judge this week ruled that bidding at the enforced auction — to be staged in court on September 28 — must start at a comparatively paltry £6.8 million.

It means that unless the affable, carrot-topped star settles the unpaid debt — for gardening, irrigation and maintenance work stretching back years — before that date he will lose not only his prized house, nestling in olive groves outside the Majorcan town of Arta, but also the fat profit he hoped to make from the sale.

For sale: Boris has been ordered to sell his luxury villa in Majorca

For Becker, though, who recently moved with his second wife, Lilly Kerssenberg, 35, and their two-year-old son, Amadeus, from the stylish London home he had been renting for three years (within lobbing distance of Wimbledon’s Centre Court) to another, more modest house in the same area, there was more bad news this week.

In a separate civil court hearing, also in Palma, a judge ordered him to hand a further £345,000 to a local building firm that complained its bills for carpentry, electrical and plumbing jobs, and the laying of a basketball court, also went unpaid.

In each case, Becker’s lawyers had argued that the invoices ought to have been settled by estate agent Matthias Khun & Partner, who, they said, had agreed to pay for the property’s upkeep while it was on the market, recouping their outlay after the sale. But this argument was rejected by both courts.

Of course, these two judgments are deeply embarrassing for Becker, one of the all-time tennis greats and described by the BBC as ‘Britain’s favourite German’ by dint of his chirpily forthright Wimbledon commentaries, spiky hairdo and Munich-meets-Essex style of dress.

Boris Becker and Lilly Becker snapped at a Wimbledon Party at Ralph Lauren, South Kensington last year

Since the sums involved are relatively modest — at least for a man who amassed £50 million in prize money and sponsorship deals during his tennis career and was recently estimated to have assets worth twice that sum — his unpaid debts pose a thorny question.

Why, rather than settle them quietly, has he chosen to have his name dragged through the wrong sort of courts? As a source close to the Majorca cases remarked to me: ‘It looks as though Mr Becker has some sort of cash-flow problem.’

That seems, at least, a reasonable hypothesis. Records show that Becker’s Spanish company, Goatbridge — which owns the villa — has net assets of nearly £3 million, and he is believed to own other properties (including his declared place of residence in a Swiss tax haven), plus a tennis racquet company. He also has lucrative endorsement deals with Mercedes Benz and the stylish watch company Tag Hauer, among others.

In recent weeks, though, at least four mainstream German language news outlets have published headlines asking outright whether Becker, one of the country’s most revered sporting heroes, is going pleite — bankrupt.

Earlier this year, a German court ordered him to pay almost £800,000 to Klaus Harisch, his former partner in a failed company that marketed organic foods on the internet, while the Spanish revenue authorities are claiming more than £80,000 in unpaid tax.

After marrying Lilly, a stunning, Surinamese-Swiss model, in St Moritz, in 2009, Becker (who syndicated a film of the ceremony) even refused to pay the pastor’s full fee.

It was, he insisted, a matter of ‘principle’, because the clergyman had charged five times the usual amount. But a court this year found against him and ordered him to hand over an extra £2,235.

All this comes on top of his conviction for tax evasion in 2002 — he received a two-year suspended sentence and was ordered to pay £2.5 million in back tax, fines, and costs after claiming Monaco as his main residence while spending much time in Munich — and the collapse several years ago of two other firms he founded. 

Then there was his ill-advised decision to lend his name to the Boris Becker Business Tower, which was to have soared 19 storeys above Dubai, only for its financial backers to go bust last year.  

This string of post-tennis failures led the Austrian news website 24.AT  — repeating a refrain that has been aired many times since he re-invented himself as an entrepreneur — to decry Becker’s ‘not especially clever business talent’.

‘Recently Boris and his wife Lilly shone at the traditional pageant of the rich and famous, the Vienna Opera Ball,’ it commented. ‘But behind his glamorous facade he has great worries. Becker’s wallet is no longer bulging as in the times when . . . he scooped millions in sport. The elaborate, jet-set lifestyle . . . seems no longer viable.’

Boris' ex-wife Barbara Becker with their youngest son Elias, second right, and Noah, second left, during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Berlin, last week

If this is true, and he really has hit hard times, where did it all go wrong?

Some point to the failure of his first major business venture, a website he launched in 2000 called Sportgate which promised to provide news, links and chatrooms for fans of local, amateur sports.

Among seasoned Becker watchers in Germany, however, the more compelling explanation dates back a further two years to his fling with Angela Ermakova, in the exclusive Nobu restaurant in London’s Park Lane.

If we believe his autobiography, she stalked him with an animal lust that was reciprocated, their fateful sex taking place on the stairs between the lavatories and lasting ‘a few seconds’.

If we accept the dusky Russian’s story, she was a respectable graduate, Becker had courted her during three previous meetings, their encounter lasted some 20 minutes and it happened in a linen cupboard.

(An unlikely, though nonetheless intriguing third version, published later in a Russian magazine, holds that Becker’s sperm was ‘stolen’ by Ermokova as part of a sinister Mafia blackmail plot).

Whatever the truth, for Becker the results were financially and emotionally catastrophic.

Then married, apparently contentedly, to his African-American wife Barbara, with one son, Noah, now 18, and another, Elias, now 12, on the way, his family life disintegrated amid a series of jealous rows, and instead of being remembered as one of the greatest players of the modern era, he became a figure of ridicule.

The divorce cost him a reported £11 million in cash, plus their  £3 million home near Oprah Winfrey’s on exclusive Fisher Island, Miami, and £2 million in legal fees. He then had to spend millions more on a new house of his own.

When it was revealed that he had also handed some £2 million to Ermakova following the birth of their love-child — a daughter who is now 12 — the jibes grew crueller. Bonking Boris, the tabloids said, had achieved an unwanted new record — for the most expensive ‘quickie’ in history. 

As this proud, and in many ways admirable man has remarked, after his Wimbledon triumphs it was a painful blast of reality. And, who knows, perhaps his keenness to throw himself into high-profile business ventures has been the corollary, his ambition driven by the burning desire to prove his talents again and restore his reputation.

If so, it appears, at times, to  have had the opposite effect,  leading to too many hasty, ill-considered decisions.

Becker in the Royal Box on Centre Court during this year's Wimbledon tournament. Becker lives with wife Lily and two-year-old son not far from the All England Lawn Tennis Club

But he is now enjoying a sporting renaissance, of sorts, as a star of televised poker games, and his personal life — though still convoluted by conventional standards — appears more settled.

His wandering eye fell upon curvaceous Lilly, a former model and casino croupier once married to a New York lawyer, in a Miami restaurant in 2005. She says he was ‘too shy’ to approach her (once bitten, perhaps) and sent his son Noah to make the introduction.

Their romance was broken in 2008 by his brief engagement to Alessandra Meyer-Woldren, the daughter of his late manager, but quickly resumed.  Becker married Lilly in June the following year and settled down in Wimbledon, the scene of his  greatest triumphs.

And though he is still fond of champagne parties, according a former neighbour in Burghley Road, SW19, where he lived until moving a mile or so away, Becker now appears to be intent on playing the responsible family man second  time around.

While his poker games and chequered business dealings still take him around the world — usually at someone else’s expense — he and Lilly, and blond little Amadeus, are popular fixtures in the shops and cafes of Wimbledon village.

And despite his latest travails, he insisted this week — in an extraordinarily heartfelt signed statement he sent me in response to questions about his Majorcan cases — that his old indomitable spirit is unbroken and his zest for life as vibrant as ever. ‘Many thanks for your inquiry, though there is no need to worry about me,’ Becker wrote.

‘I have been in the public spotlight for over 27 years now. So naturally there have been lots of stories since then — some of them are true, most of them are not.

‘I have learnt to deal with rumours in those years. It comes with being a popular and famous man — so no complaints. The beauty of the internet is that everybody can say whatever he wants without being held accountable . . . it’s a free information highway with no speed limit!

‘As regards my business, it is doing very well, though by nature not every deal goes through in the same way as I did not win all the tennis matches I played.

‘You will recall that I lost four out of seven Wimbledon finals.

‘Concerning my finca [house] in Majorca, I hope you understand  that I am not allowed to provide you with any details given that it is a pending lawsuit.

‘Only so much of it is not about my ability to pay open bills.

‘So again, don’t worry, the rumours are unfounded.

‘I consider myself as not only happy, blessed and healthy but also still wealthy, and most importantly my family is doing well.’ 

Becker’s many British fans will doubtless be delighted to hear him in such vintage form.

But if his Majorcan villa goes under the hammer for a knockdown price this autumn, even they might begin to wonder whether ‘Boom-boom Boris’ really is going bust.