German boxer from Bosnia-HerzegovinaAdnan Catic, also known as Felix Sturm, will be released to defend himself.
This was decided on Wednesday at the Cologne Regional Court, and the boxer will have to pay a bail of 300,000 euros, according to Bild.
He should be on bail by Christmas, and as soon as he does, he will be released on condition that he does not leave Germany.
On November 4th this year,the court guard at Cologne District Court brought Adnan Catic, also known as Felix Sturm, to room 112 of the Cologne Courthouse. The trial of the former Boxing World Champion has begun several days later.
He will be charged with tax evasion of 5.8 million Euros, and the sentence, if found guilty, could be up to 10 years in prison.
Catic was arrested on April 5ththis year in Cologne during a visit to the FIBO fitness fair and was arrested by police on charges of tax evasion.
The court denied him a request for release on bail of one million euros, and was recently charged with evading taxes of seven million euros.
If the allegations turn out to be true, Catic will face up to several years in prison, given that had suspended sentence of 22 months in 2012 for tax evasion.
Catic, who fights under the alias Felix Sturm, was a world champion in his career with a score of 40 wins, five losses and three draws.
On February 20th, 2016, Catic had the last fight in Oberhausen against Fjodor Cudinov after which he was positive on the forbidden substance.
He broke the silence two months later with a post which he shared via Instagram where he complained about being treated unfairly by the doping investigators. Sturm wrote that he was only informed two months after the first doping sample about the results and that he wasn’t told why it took longer than usual (two weeks).
After engaging a lawyer who requested all the required documents from the investigators he noticed that the last page was missing, “…where is written, when my sample arrived at the laboratory, who received it and who analysed the sample.”, it was written in that social media post. He allegedly didn’t get an answer after submitting further inquiries and was denied the right to let the b-sample be analysed by another laboratory. Sturm claimed that the WBA refrained from suspending him because of these irregularities.
But, after almost three years Catic has proved his innocence and he is preparing for a great return.
Catic, who will be 40 years old on January 31st, is the fifth world champion.
In his career, he had 49 matches in which he scored 40 wins with six defeats, and ended three without a winner.
Probably, his 50th fight will be against Arthur Abraham (38), also a multiple champion in the middle and supreme category.
Catic is a five-time world champion in two weight classes, having held the WBO middleweight title from 2003 to 2004, the WBA middleweight title twice between 2006 and 2012, the IBF middleweight title from 2013 to 2014, and the WBA (Super) super-middleweight title in 2016.
