Memphis Depay’s agent has denied that the Atletico Madrid forward paid Dani Alves’ €1m (£850,000) bail to enable the Barcelona icon to walk out of prison on Monday.
Alves, 40, had been held at Brians 2 Prison near Barcelona since January 2023 after being accused of raping a young woman in a nightclub bathroom in the Spanish city in the early hours of December 31, 2022.
He was found guilty of rape last month and was handed a four-and-a-half year prison sentence, which he subsequently appealed. Alves pleaded to be released on bail, and his bail bond was set at €1m.
It appeared that he would struggle to raise this figure due to the Brazilian reportedly having two empty bank accounts and another in the red, but he managed to pay the fee on Monday and was released from prison.
A claim was made by a social media account on Monday afternoon that Depay had paid the bail bond to help out his former team-mate, but his agent, Sebastien Ledure, has insisted there is no truth behind this allegation.
“This is fake news. It is false news, it is not true at all,” Ledure said on Tuesday.
Depay and Alves briefly played together for Barcelona between November 2021 and July 2022, after the latter returned to the club following his hugely successful first spell at the Nou Camp.
Depay is not the only former team-mate of Alves’ to be linked with helping the Brazil star. It was reported last month that his ex-international team-mate Neymar’s family had helped pay Alves’ £128,000 fine in his rape case to mitigate the sentence handed down following his conviction.
The former full back’s release from jail while he awaits the verdict of his appeal sparked a furious reaction from the lawyer of Alves’ rape victim, who slammed the decision as ‘justice for the rich’.
