Boris Becker's luxury villa up for sale to pay off debts

London, July 14 (ANI): Boris Becker's sumptuous Majorcan villa has been put up for auction by a judge, so that 225,000 pounds of the profits can be set aside to pay a long-standing debt which owes to a local landscape gardening company.

Forced to serve up divorce and paternity settlements totalling more than 20 million pounds 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, the former tennis player had been trying to sell the villa for five years anyway.

According to a local estate agent, his original asking price of 13 million pounds 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 poubds, there were no takers, the Daily Mail reported.

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 pounds.

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 Becker, though, who recently moved with his second wife, Lilly Kerssenberg and their two-year-old son, Amadeus, from the stylish London home he had been renting for three years 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 pounds 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. (ANI)