“Spain will decide, History will judge us.” The memoirs of Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón end with a lapidary sentence that culminates more than 500 pages of a journey through a life with much more history than trials. A book that tiptoes with apologies and clarifications about the millionaire management of a fortune behind the backs of the Treasury and public opinion while Spain was sinking into an unprecedented economic crisis that no one investigated until it was too late for it to have consequences. The prescription, the inviolability of the crown and fiscal benevolence allowed the emeritus king to avoid a dock in 2022 in which, basically, no one expected to see him sitting.
The public image of Juan Carlos I was forged for decades between two types of pages: those of history books and those of gossip magazines. The first recounted their role in the return of democracy to Spain after almost 40 years of Franco’s dictatorship. The latter fed society with pills and rumors about their love lives while episodes such as the Botswana hunt precipitated their abdication to avoid further erosion of the crown. But it was in March 2022, almost eight years after leaving the throne, when the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office published in two installments the novel of the ‘B side’ of the life of the emeritus king that even the secret services and many media outlets had worked hard to hide.
That day one thing became clear at the judicial level: Juan Carlos de Borbón would never set foot in a court, at least not as a defendant. But the Public Ministry detailed in a double archival decree the never-told and detailed story of the finances of the emeritus king. Accounts in Switzerland, foundations in Panama, millions hidden around the world in the name of third parties and gifts from the aristocracy that were not under the scrutiny of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Tax Agency until it was too late. The investigation that exposed their shame to the whole world was, at the same time, their best legal shield.
The bulk of the investigations against him have as their starting point the year 2008. That year the Panamanian foundation Lucum was launched, which had up to four bank accounts in Switzerland at the service of the king and with the intervention of Arturo Fasana – a world reference in offshore accounting – and Dante Canónica. That same year, while unemployment in Spain reached 3.2 million people, Juan Carlos de Borbón received 64.8 million euros from Saudi Arabia. “Amount sent by King Abdullah as a gift according to Saudi tradition to other monarchies,” was the subject of the transfer. Two years later, another 1.4 transferred by the Sultan of Bahrain entered another account in the name of this foundation.
The money rested peacefully in the Swiss bank Mirabaud, away from public opinion and the Christmas messages in which the monarch asked citizens and institutions for solidarity and exemplarity, until mid-2012. Until, looking sad and with his tie incorrectly placed, he intoned his already illustrious “I’m very sorry, I was wrong and it won’t happen again” after breaking his hip on a hunt in Botswana. Less than two months later, all his Swiss money was sent to the Bahamas as an “irrevocable donation” to his lover Corinna Larsen. One of the few times when public opinion, in the midst of an economic crisis, witnessed an uncontrolled detonation of the wall that had protected it for decades.
The Botswana episode triggered the emptying of his hidden accounts and his abdication but not his link to other people’s money and his constant use of funds not declared to the Treasury. The investigations of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Tax Agency reflect that between 2016 and 2019 his friend and businessman Allen Sanginés Krause, through his former field assistant Nicolás Murga, sent him more than 516,000 euros, money that the king and his “relatives or close friends” invested in personal expenses, in addition to paying for the monarch’s medical treatments. In those years, in addition, his cousin Álvaro de Orleans paid him several million euros through the Zagatka Foundation in flights and trips that were never analyzed by the treasury either.
The Spanish Prosecutor’s Office officially announced the opening of an investigation into Juan Carlos de Borbón in June 2020 and the king emeritus, in the midst of the pandemic, headed to Abu Dhabi (Emirates) to interpose 7,500 kilometers between him and the country that, for the first time, saw its ‘B side’ without the powers that be being able to raise the dikes that had always protected his image in time. But his fall was seen coming before. The Swiss Prosecutor’s Office, by then, had been investigating for two years whether the 64.8 million that arrived from Saudi Arabia were not a gift but a commission. The Spanish Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office had two other investigations open and had even traveled to London to interrogate his former lover, the German aristocrat Corinna Larsen.
All this was well known even through the media. To such an extent that, already in the first months of 2020, the king emeritus had hired a lawyer and his son, Felipe VI, had announced that he was renouncing his inheritance. In those months, the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office centralized the triple investigation against Juan Carlos I, covering not only the Saudi millions and the payments from Sanginés and Zagatka but also their alleged connection with a hidden money trust in the then tax haven of Jersey. A siege on three fronts that collided with a legal wall that will protect Juan Carlos I for life from what his own memoirs define as “errors.”
Prescription, payments to the Treasury and monarchical shield
A relevant part of the Prosecutor’s investigation was stillborn. Whether the hidden fortune of the emeritus monarch was considered an accumulation of bribes, bribes and corruption or if it was only understood that he owed money to the Treasury, everything that Juan Carlos de Borbón had done until 2014 was protected by the constitutional inviolability of the Spanish Crown and, just in case, also by prescription. The Public Ministry led by Dolores Delgado at the time was clear when it organized its proceedings in 2020 and repeated it when it filed them all in 2022: “There is no court in our legal system that is attributed the power to prosecute the king for acts committed during his mandate, whether civil or criminal acts.”
The Prosecutor’s Office separated him from the millionaire Jersey trust and decided that there was no evidence that the almost 65 million euros of Saudi origin were a commission for participating in the awarding of the AVE project to Mecca to Spanish companies, which was later. And he then focused his efforts on the possible tax crimes of the emeritus king. For not declaring a single euro of the many millions that he hid for years in Switzerland until 2012 nor of the hundreds of thousands of euros that Allen Sanginés and his cousin Álvaro de Orleans paid him in trips and other flattery.
The conclusion of the Prosecutor’s Office was that where inviolability had not reached, the statute of limitations had: by the time the proceedings began, any possible criminal accusation against Juan Carlos de Borbón had expired. But not everything was protected: the payments of his businessmen and close aristocrats were still on time and, most importantly, outside the constitutional protection that the throne provided him until 2014. But it was March 2022 and the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that the defense move of the emeritus king had gone perfectly: he had paid almost five million to the Treasury a year before and that blocked any accusation of tax fraud.
The defense maneuver of the emeritus king had taken place in broad daylight. In December 2020, he paid 678,394 euros to the Treasury with the concept: “To the donations of Allen Sanginés Krause.” That is, all the inheritance and donation tax that he had not paid for the money that the Mexican businessman had sent him through a military man he trusted that he and his family spent without control. Shortly after, between February 1 and 2, 2021, he presented new self-assessments and paid 4,416,757.46 euros more for personal income tax, which he also did not pay for years for the trips that his cousin paid for him through the Zagatka Foundation.
The loans that saved the king
The second payment, the largest, came from loans that 12 people around him made at full speed. Loans and not donations to avoid having to pay taxes and to avoid legal problems as long as the monarch returns the money. One of them, revealed by elDiario.es, from the businesswoman Alicia Koplowitz: 200,000 euros to be returned in five years with an interest of 3%, a period that ends at the end of next January.
The conclusion of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office was that these payments to the Treasury allowed the king to free himself from any accusation of tax fraud because he made them, according to Luzón, before knowing that he was being investigated for his pending accounts with the treasury. A statement with some bumps: by the time he made the two payments and sealed peace with the Tax Agency, the Prosecutor’s Office had informed his lawyer of the opening of all proceedings against him. But, according to the Prosecutor’s Office itself, not in such detail as to understand that he already knew why he was being investigated.
The statement collides with some Supreme Court rulings issued in recent years and also with the reality beyond the walls of the Prosecutor’s Office. elDiario.es revealed in the first days of November 2020 that Anticorruption was investigating the emeritus monarch who had used a military man as a front man to channel the money of the Mexican Sanginés Krause. One month before regularization. The Prosecutor’s Office, as several media outlets published throughout 2020 in their cross rogatory commissions with Switzerland, had already pointed out Álvaro de Orleans. Also long before Juan Carlos I’s second payment to the Treasury.
The Prosecutor’s Office’s argument to validate these payments and protect the emeritus monarch for life was that the Prosecutor’s Office itself had not given sufficient detail about its investigation and that, in practice, this had allowed it to plug all the waterways in time. “Neither in the decrees initiating both investigation proceedings nor in the respective notifications was there any reference to the facts to which the tax declarations were made, for the simple reason that at that time the circumstances to which they referred were unknown.”
Prosecutor Luzón’s arguments were blessed by the Supreme Court when the Criminal Chamber rejected a complaint from jurists and former magistrates and prosecutors that stated the opposite: that the king knew perfectly well why he was being investigated and paid the Treasury to avoid the bench after the referee’s whistle. “Nothing has changed three years later,” the Supreme Court ruled in an order that, de facto, makes it impossible for the emeritus king to have to respond criminally for the management of his fortune. The London courts also certified his shield against accusations of harassment by Corinna Larsen, who described coordinated harassment at the request of the monarch when she did not want to return to him and return his almost 65 million.
Once protected from his own past, Juan Carlos I has decided to go on the attack. He took the former Cantabrian president Miguel Ángel Revilla to court for years of televised criticism and also sued his former lover in London, without it being known at the moment what both lawsuits have ended up with months after they were filed. Meanwhile, the emeritus king offers in his book ‘Reconciliation’ his version of a life whose dark side was not known in detail until there was no other choice.
Source: www.eldiario.es
