Boris Becker, African diplomat

WHEN people say “diplomatic service”, they seldom mean an envoy who can slam an ace over the net at 130 miles per hour. Yet Boris Becker, a German former tennis star who could once do just that, told a London court on June 14th that he should be excused from proceedings because he has diplomatic immunity.

After Mr Becker was declared bankrupt last year he faced claims to his assets from a private bank. Instead of coughing up, Mr Becker said that he is, in fact, a representative of the Central African Republic (CAR), a failed state wedged between Congo and Chad. This, Mr Becker said, should end the “farce” of his being pursued by creditors.

In fact the farce had only just begun. On June 19th officials in the CAR’s foreign ministry told AFP, a newswire, that the diplomatic passport was a fake, possibly from a batch of passports stolen in 2014. Mr Becker had claimed to be a sports envoy for the country, working out of its Brussels embassy. The officials said that the job did not exist. That is despite a picture of Mr Becker on the embassy’s website, and a photo (above) of his meeting the CAR’s president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, in April, when he claimed to have been appointed.

What is the reality? It is hard to say; perhaps Mr Becker really is a diplomat. The CAR is a country with a state budget of around $380m, which is not quite double the annual revenue of the All England Tennis club at Wimbledon, where Mr Becker won his first major title in 1985. It is known for civil war and anarchy and, like Mr Becker, struggles to pay its debts. It is plausible that one arm of the CAR government does not know what the other is doing.

It would not be the first time that a diplomatic passport has found its way into unlikely hands. In 2013 Alma Shalabayeva, the wife of a Kazakh billionaire, Mukhtar Ablyazov, was arrested in Rome with just such a passport, also issued by the CAR. Until his death in 2015, Antonio Deinde Fernandez, a Nigerian billionaire, served as the CAR’s ambassador to the UN for 18 years. Curiously, he had also served as a deputy ambassador to the UN for Mozambique. Others who have apparently been made diplomats by the CAR include an Israeli businessman and an adviser to Libya’s former dictator, Muammar Qaddafi.

The countries that have the most difficulty keeping track of all their diplomats are often small and plagued by graft. In December, the tiny Comoros Islands cancelled “at least” 158 diplomatic passports. They had been used for all sorts of purposes, including breaking sanctions on Iran. In 2011 a Danish filmmaker, Mads Brugger, made a documentary in which he apparently travelled around the CAR on a fraudulently-acquired Liberian passport, bought through a Dutch intermediary. In the documentary he assumed the identity of a dandy diamond merchant by the name of Mads Cortzen.

In 2016 Walid Juffali, a wealthy Saudi, claimed immunity from divorce proceedings in Britain on the basis that he was St Lucia’s representative to the UN’s International Maritime Organisation. Philip Hammond, then Britain’s foreign secretary, supported his claim, arguing that overruling it might set a precedent that could later hurt British diplomats overseas. However, a court ruled that Juffali’s diplomatic status was irrelevant to his divorce, and he had to pay his ex-wife a fortune.