Juan Carlos I: proven facts

Juan Carlos I, on Friday in Abu Dhabi, during a Rafa Nadal tennis match.ALI HAIDER (EFE)

Police inspector Manuel Morocho is able to find crimes behind an income statement, a bank statement or a public tender. He has a degree in Economics and has a reputation for being unstoppable. Those convicted of the

, an extensive corruption scheme that ended the Government of Mariano Rajoy (PP), had read Morocho's reports for years as if they were unappealable prison sentences. This policeman traveled to Geneva (Switzerland) in May 2009 with the mission of looking for Gürtel's loot. A dozen Spanish politicians and businessmen, entangled in the corrupt plot, hid more than 100 million euros in various Swiss banks.

Inspector Morocho and his chief inspector entered the Rhône Gestión offices, located in an imposing building on the banks of the mouth of the Rhone River.

The owner of that company, Arturo Gianfranco Fasana, detained a few days earlier at the Barajas airport (Madrid), confessed to the judge that he made a living managing Spanish fortunes, among others, that of Gürtel's ringleader, Francisco Correa.

That day in May 2009, Morocho registered the strength of financial secrets without knowing what he would find.

It had a court order, but it was marked with red lines from the Swiss prosecutor's office: Fasana was only obliged to hand over information related to those investigated.

And so it was done.

The requisitioned material was incorporated, censored, into the summary: the lists of Spanish millionaires with money hidden in Switzerland, which Fasana grouped together in an account called "Soleado", were filled with studs.

Dozens of names - alleged tax fraudsters - were erased because they had no relation to the investigated plot.

One of the businessmen whose name was not removed from that documentation went to the newspaper EL PAÍS in 2011 to deny the accusations that linked him with millionaire payments to Correa for a real estate business.

The businessman admitted to the newspaper's director's office that Fasana's clients in Switzerland included himself, but also "the Spanish aristocracy and King Juan Carlos."

He did not provide data or evidence to substantiate what he said about the emeritus.

Eight years after that episode, the Geneva prosecutor Yves Bertossa searched the Fasana offices on the banks of the Rhone River and found the documentation of the allegedly irregular financial transactions of Juan Carlos I between 2008 and 2018. Fasana was also the manager of the hidden fortune of the king of Spain.

The key recording that uncovered the scandal.

That Bertossa investigation was closed last Monday without guilty after three years of searches, interrogations and rogatory commissions that failed to prove a crime of money laundering for the alleged collection of illegal commissions in the works of the AVE to Mecca.

The case had started in the summer of 2018 after the recordings of a meeting held three years earlier in London between Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and Corinna Larsen, ex-lover of Juan Carlos I. At that meeting, the woman spoke about the The fortune that the emeritus king was hiding abroad, although in reality that money had already passed into his hands, and he gave some names of possible figureheads. The Geneva prosecutor pulled that thread and located enough documentation to prove the multimillion-dollar income that was hidden from the Spanish authorities and for which no taxes were paid.

The King of Saudi Arabia, Abdalá bin Abdulaziz, donated 100 million dollars in August 2008 to the King of Spain Juan Carlos I and he deposited that fortune in the Mirabaud bank of Switzerland on behalf of the Lucum Foundation, registered in Panama.

In April 2010, Fasana credited this account with a new gift to the emeritus from the Sultan of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa: $ 1,895,250.

Suspicions of the Tax Agency about tax evaders.

In those years, the Spanish Tax Agency began to denounce fraudulent activities of tax evaders consisting of the creation of shell companies in tax havens "to further hide the true identity of the holder of the funds and thus avoid the application of the European savings directive 2005 ″.

This regulation was intended to combat money laundering and stated in Article 6: “Member States will prohibit their credit and financial institutions from maintaining anonymous accounts [...] Member States will require, without exceptions of any kind, that the holders and beneficiaries of anonymous accounts or anonymous savings books are subject as soon as possible to due diligence measures with respect to the client and, in any case, before any use of said accounts or savings books is made ". But if the money was put in the name of a foundation registered in Panama, identifying the owner was almost impossible again.

Taxes never paid for donations received.

Juan Carlos I never declared those donations to the Spanish Tax Agency. If he had done so, according to the calculations provided to this newspaper by the union of technicians of the Ministry of Finance (Gestha), he should have paid 51,821,608 euros for the donation tax corresponding to the gift of the King of Saudi Arabia. If to this amount is added the result of the donation made by the Sultan of Bahrain, the unpaid taxes of the king emeritus would exceed 53 million euros.

Although they seem excessive fees (80% of what was received) they correspond to the application of the tax legislation in force in the Community of Madrid in August 2008. In addition to taxing the donation more because it originates from people without a relationship with Juan Carlos I , the tax introduces another multiplying factor that makes it more expensive depending on the pre-existing patrimony of the person who receives the gift of money.

"Irrevocable donation" to the ex-lover.

King Juan Carlos, pressured by the Mirabaud bank, which kept his fortune for him and feared that the anomaly would be discovered, disposed of the money in 2012 by transferring all the funds - "irrevocable donation", as he would explain many years later - to a Corinna Larsen's account at Gonet Bank of the Bahamas.

Larsen maintains in the lawsuit that she filed in the British High Court of Justice, still pending resolution, that Juan Carlos I wanted to resume his romantic relationship with her in 2012, broken three years before, and proposed to her on several occasions, until in 2014 claimed the money he had given her earlier.

She refused to return it because, according to her version, this could lead to criminal consequences if someone concluded that she had acted as a simple figurehead for the Monarch.

The risk of losing inviolability.

Juan Carlos I abdicated on June 2, 2014 and lost on June 19 - when the resignation became effective - the legal shield that article 56 of the Constitution grants to the monarchs in office: "The person of the King is inviolable and not is subject to liability ”.

The emeritus continued to travel in

private

around the world, on expensive flights that were not paid for out of pocket, because he could not, but were paid for by the Zagatka Foundation of his distant cousin Álvaro de Orleans.

The suspicion that the millionaire funds of that Foundation actually belong to Juan Carlos I has never been proven and Álvaro de Orleans has denied it before the prosecutor himself.

The 198,000 euros that the emeritus king had as an annual allocation in the budgets of the Royal House were scarce to maintain his standard of living.

He also turned to his friend Allen Sanginés-Krause, the Mexican businessman who admitted in September 2020 to Spain's anti-corruption prosecutors that he had given close to one million euros to Juan Carlos I between 2016 and 2018.

As he had done when it was still inviolable with the donations of the King of Saudi Arabia and the Sultan of Bahrain, he did not declare these gifts to the Spanish treasury, as he himself acknowledged when he presented regularizations to the Tax Agency in December 2020 (678,393 euros for the gifts from Sanginés-Krause) and in February 2021 (4,395,901 euros for the flights paid by the Zagatka Foundation of Álvaro de Orleans).

Juan Carlos I settled his debts with the Treasury when he already knew that the Supreme Prosecutor's Office was investigating him and when he had been able to read in the press some details of those investigations.

For a tax regularization to be valid it has to be spontaneous, according to the law.

The finance technicians union (Gestha) maintains that the regularization of Juan Carlos I is incorrect, since it was done knowing that the open investigation could lead to a prosecution complaint for a tax offense. The amount that the emeritus king would have defrauded exceeded 120,000 euros in each year. However, the Supreme Prosecutor's Office maintains that the notifications made to Juan Carlos I's lawyer were generic, did not detail the causes of the open investigation and, therefore, they understand that the regularization is correct and avoids the accusation.

Switzerland sent last Wednesday the latest data on movements in the accounts of the Zagatka Foundation in the years 2014 and 2015. The Prosecutor's Office has now asked the experts of the National Office for Fraud Investigation (ONIF) to report on the new documentation. Sources familiar with this case indicate that they do not expect surprises in the information sent from Switzerland and maintain the idea of ​​filing in the coming weeks the investigation opened by these unreported incomes at the time but later regularized by Juan Carlos I.

A tax hideout in the Channel Islands.

In October 2020, a suspicious movement of money from Jersey to Spain alerted the authorities of the Money Laundering Service (Sepblac), which reported the existence of a

(fideocomiso) registered in the Channel Islands - tax haven - at the beginning of the nineties, among whose holders appeared the name of Juan Carlos I. The

was created with a significant amount of money - more than 10 million euros - by Manuel Prado and Colón de Carvajal. This financial instrument still had substantial reserves of money in 2020, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Colón de Carvajal, who died in 2009 and a friend of King Juan Carlos, was sentenced in 2004 and 2006 to two years and one year in prison, respectively - he only spent two months in jail - for misappropriation in connection with the

The Torras-Kio group diverted 12 million euros to an account in Switzerland opened in the name of Prado and Colón de Carvajal. The first sentence detailed how businessman Javier de la Rosa took advantage of the changes that were unleashed as a result of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to divert multimillion-dollar funds from Torras, owned by KIO, taking them abroad to enter them into a Prado account and Colón de Carvajal "who agreed to receive them and then give them a destination that is not known."

Huge documentation sent by the British authorities has been analyzed for months by the team of prosecutors of the Supreme Court, which investigates whether Juan Carlos I is behind the latest movements of money detected in the

created by Colón de Carvajal in the early nineties . The documentation submitted confirms the presence of the emeritus king during the first years of the life of the society registered in Jersey, according to the investigation, but that track has been lost for many years.

Prosecutors have investigated the person who remained in charge of that company when Prado y Colón de Carvajal died in case he can provide information on the money entered in Spain in 2020 and identify its real recipient. It is about Joaquín Romero-Maura, whom the prosecutors tried to question at the geriatric residence where he resides. But the management was unsuccessful due to the situation in which the alleged figurehead of Prado and Colón de Carvajal finds himself, according to sources in the investigation.

Juan Carlos I has denied through his environment any link with that

Jersey

since the investigation by the Prosecutor's Office became known, the third that was opened against the king emeritus. This case is still alive after a six-month extension was approved in early December so that experts can analyze all the documentation sent from Switzerland, although it is very likely that they will not run out of the deadline.

Three years after judges and prosecutors began to unravel the financial secrets of Juan Carlos I, the open processes have uncovered multiple irregularities in the actions of the former king of Spain from November 22, 1975 to June 18, 2014. The inviolability, which protected him from being judged for his actions during that period, the prescription of crimes and the two extraordinary regularizations that he made after his abdication have saved him from a safe indictment for multi-million dollar tax fraud.

The return of the king, a political problem for almost everyone

CARLOS E. CUÉ

The return of the emeritus king to Spain, which does not seem imminent but very likely when the prosecution decrees the filing of the process against him because he understands that he is covered by inviolability, is a political problem of the first magnitude not only for the House of King, but also for the Government. The Executive has left the management of this complex situation in the hands of Felipe VI, but his discomfort with the matter is evident. Pedro Sánchez insists that Don Juan Carlos must explain the scandal, but the King Emeritus shows no intention of doing so. And he wants to return to Spain to lead the same life as before and even in La Zarzuela, according to journalists close to the Monarch.

The government does not hide the discomfort with the emeritus king, whom they consider not only a tax fraudster but a man with a very selfish behavior with his own son and with the Monarchy, which the PSOE wants to protect because it is part of the pact of which the socialists are a fundamental part.

However, several members of the Executive consulted by this newspaper also point out that it would be a problem for the emeritus king to die in exile, in Abu Dhabi, so it is logical to think that he will return as soon as his case is filed in Spain, already in 2022 .

Shortly after, the Tax Agency will also say that the regularization of almost five million euros is valid, according to the calculations handled by political sources.

But that judicial ending does not clear up the problem.

Because the prosecution's brief, in all probability, will make it clear that Juan Carlos I committed serious irregularities, and it is total inviolability, a highly questioned protection that does not exist in most of the countries of the Spanish environment, which will save him from be prosecuted.

If the emeritus insists on not giving explanations, the only thing left to protect the Monarchy is for La Zarzuela to accept legal reforms to increase transparency and try to improve the image of this key institution.

But these initiatives, which the Government has almost ready, have been on hold for a year because the Casa del Rey has not just decided.

Everything seems blocked, even the question of the return of the emeritus.

But the moment to make decisions has come.