Dani Alves will need to wait a few more hours to bid farewell, even temporarily, to the cell that has housed him for the past 14 months in a prison in Barcelona.
The Brazilian, who was found guilty of raping a young woman on New Year’s Day 2023 at a club in Barcelona and is serving a 4.5-year sentence, has filed an appeal, and today the court granted his request for temporary release but imposed a bail of 1 million euros.
Given his career, this amount is very small, but with Alves being involved in a legal dispute with his ex-wife for the past two years and his accounts frozen, he once again needed the help of his former teammate and friend Neymar.
The current Al-Hilal player gave him 150,000 euros at the end of 2023 to be used as compensation for the victim (and to mitigate his situation, which it did), and now, even with much more money needed, he didn’t hesitate.
At his instruction, his father transferred the one-million-euro amount to an unseizable account (presumably belonging to the footballer’s lawyer) to cover the bail, but the transfer had not been completed by 2:30 PM (Spain time), so Alves will spend today in prison.
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Presumably, the money will be available tomorrow, and immediately after his release, the 42-year-old will have to report to the designated police station, submit his passports (Spanish and Brazilian), inform where he will be staying until his appeals are heard, and be informed of when he must visit the authorities…
It’s also worth noting that in recent days, Alves received some more good news as his long-standing dispute with the tax authorities in Spain concluded, with the player winning the case and being refunded 6.8 million euros, which, however, won’t be deposited into his accounts immediately but rather once the bureaucratic procedures are completed.
