Former WBA super middleweight and middleweight champion Felix Sturm (40-5-3) has been sentenced to three years in jail for tax evasion and attempted tax evasion, reports BILD.

However, the regional court in Cologne freed Sturm of some of the charges, but the case still involved one million euro.

The charges first involved a case for 5.8 million euro of tax evasion between 2008-2015.

Sturm, who is born and raised in German but of Bosnian descent, was also sentenced for a breach of the German doping legislation after testing positive (a complicated case due to some mistakes in the testing procedure) for stanozolol after the fight against Fedor Chudinov in 2016. 

He went into semi-retirement after that fight. Sturm returned to Germany for a planned comeback - but he was arrested and spent eight months in custody before being released just before Christmas last year.

The now 41-year old was one of the biggest stars in the "old" Universum stable but broke away in 2010 to form Sturm Box Promotion along with manager Roland Bebak and did very well for a couple of years but began to fade around 2012 and there were some controversial decisions in and out of the ropes - including the affair with a positive doping test involving Sam Soliman, who beat Sturm the first time around - and the doping case ended up in court and it took three years to resolve and Soliman was exonerated.

In 2004, Sturm gave an out-of-shape Oscar De La Hoya all he could handle but lost a disputed decision. He came back to win the WBA middleweight title in 2006 but suffered an upset loss to Spanish veteran Javier Castillejo - a loss he later avenged.

There had been some talk of a fight against former champion Arthur Abraham but it will probably not happen in the near future.