General Félix Sanz Roldán went to work that Saturday, May 5, 2012 with the mission of avoiding a divorce that threatened the stability of the country.
Despite being a non-working day, the head of the Spanish secret service warned his wife that she would eat away from home.
He flew from Madrid to London, where he had made an appointment at the Connaugt hotel with a woman born in Frankfurt (Germany) in 1965, of Danish nationality and residing in Monaco since 2008. The two talked, without witnesses, for an hour.
When Sanz Roldán recounted that episode a long time later and in private (with EL PAÍS as a witness), he stressed the reason for the secret operation: “The Government of Mariano Rajoy feared that the King, in the worst of the economic crisis, would divorce, abdicate and go live with Corinna Larsen.”
To avoid this risk of crisis in the monarchical institution, the spy chief asked Larsen to end her romantic relationship with Juan Carlos I "for the good of Spain."
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But Larsen took it as a threat and tells it now in a very different way: “He told me that I knew things that could affect 45 million people and that I could not guarantee my personal safety or that of my children if I did not comply with his recommendations, which were actually orders.
And that the King was thinking of abdicating.”
General Sanz Roldan denied such threats in a trial.
The appointment without witnesses in London between the ex-lover of Juan Carlos I and the former head of the secret services is just one of the episodes of alleged harassment, illegal monitoring, threats and extortion that Larsen breaks down in the lawsuit he filed in June 2021 and that threatens to take the king emeritus to the bench.
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Corina Larsen assures that her romance with Juan Carlos I lasted five years, between 2004 and 2009. The king emeritus then met another woman and she decided to break up, according to her version.
They remained close friends, to the point that at the end of 2011, the king lent him 1.7 million to buy a house in Eaton Square valued at 5.9 million;
and in April 2012 both went together to the Botswana safari where Juan Carlos I broke his hip, after which he underwent emergency surgery in Spain, left the hospital on crutches and apologized in public to the whole country.
The facts described in Larsen's lawsuit — "unfounded accusations," according to Juan Carlos I's lawyers — are based on diffuse evidence.
In any case, it is not ruled out that there will finally be a trial, because Judge Matthew Nicklin has denied the appeal of the former monarch to avoid the investigation, understanding that immunity as a former head of state does not protect him in this case, since the crime allegedly committed It would not have to do with the exercise of the position but would have a strictly personal nature (except, the judge points out, that the participation of the CNI in the harassment was accredited).
The nine years that Corinna Larsen has allegedly been harassed by the former monarch – from April 2012 until she decided to file the lawsuit, in June 2021 – are plagued by contradictory versions, sometimes from the same person, about the known facts.
03:11
The other causes of the King Emeritus
Juan Carlos I.Photo: VÍCTOR SANZ |
Video: EPV
Gift for love or tax cover.
Juan Carlos I lost much of his prestige after suffering an accident in Botswana while hunting elephants on a luxury safari in April 2012, when the crisis opened great wounds in Spain.
The Swiss bank where he hid his fortune (65 million euros) warned the monarch that after the hunting scandal it would be convenient to close the account so as not to subject the entity to a reputational risk in case the existence of those funds became known opaque.
Juan Carlos I then decided to transfer all the money to Corinna Larsen's account at the Gonet bank in Nassau (Bahamas), according to the owners of the bank.
When the woman tries to explain the reasons for that multimillion-dollar gift from Juan Carlos I, she offers different versions.
“She offered Me that money out of gratitude and out of love.
She wanted to ensure a good future for my children and me.
I think there is one last reason: that I still had the hope of recovering, ”she declared before the prosecutor Yves Bertossa on December 19, 2018.
Three years before that confession in Switzerland, Larsen told another less emotional and more pragmatic version of the King's gifts.
In April 2015, she received Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo at her home in London for the first time, who showed her (false) CNI reports against her to gain her trust.
Corinna Larsen then told him that Juan Carlos I had a financial structure that the lawyer Dante Canonica had set up for him in which he tried to put things in the name of others: “He has put [things] in my name not because he loves me very much but because I am resident in Monaco and then I don't have the problem of declaring the patrimony”, he told her.
In that conversation, which Villarejo recorded without anyone knowing, Larsen hid from his interlocutors that King Juan Carlos had given him three years earlier a fortune of 65 million that he had hidden in Switzerland.
But the woman already gave some sign of her concern at the danger of being involved in legal proceedings.
In the conversation with Villarejo, with the businessman Juan Villalonga also present, she stated: “They put it in my name and then they say: this she doesn't want to return my things.
But if I do, it's whitewashing.
I am living a huge nightmare because they have done it with two or three things and they are putting a lot of pressure on me.
They have done that with several things, they are putting barbaric pressure on me.
I have the evidence of whoever has made these structures”.
John Villalonga.
If you want you take the monarchy ahead.
Corinna Larsen.
Yes. But I don't want to hurt.
That has never been my intention.
The phrase, recorded on Villarejo's recorder, grew old very quickly.
Abdication and fury.
On June 18, 2014, the abdication of Juan Carlos I in favor of his son Felipe VI became effective.
It happened two years after Félix Sanz Roldán went to London to convince Corinna Larsen to break up with the king to avoid her divorce and abdication.
But the monarch, according to what his ex-lover told the BBC, did not give up: “In 2014 he made desperate attempts to get her back with him, but he realized that he was not going to come back and he was completely furious.
He asked for everything back.
I think it was just a tantrum,” he recounted.
The woman now details in her lawsuit that Juan Carlos I even proposed to her in May 2014 and, given Larsen's refusal, the king emeritus demanded that she return the gifts and "spread false accusations that he had stolen money." .
Larsen's reproaches continue: according to her version,
In 2016, Larsen sees Commissioner Villarejo again and tells him that Juan Carlos I is continuing his international campaign against her.
The Internal Affairs Unit of the police places this appointment in September 2016 and transcribes the woman's confidences as follows: “The emeritus has called Russia, in Russia they love me very much.
So, Sergey Lavrov [Russian Foreign Minister since 2004] himself told me, who received the call and told him that I had never done anything at all, 'he is loyal to us and totally transparent, we love her very much and we are going to continue working with her'.
And he has also made a call to Bill Clinton, he has told me.
He knows that I am with Russia, but also with the Americans, and with the French government.
But there comes a time when people ignore you.
It is very sad because people look only at the result.
And now what does he do for them?
Nothing.
Life is so".
King Juan Carlos I, Corinna Larsen and their son Alexander pose by the tree at Christmas.
A signature of the former monarch to save his ex-partner.
Despite the poisoned relationship with Juan Carlos I that Corinna Larsen details in her lawsuit, the emeritus king made a move to shield his ex-lover from the judicial investigation that the Swiss prosecutor Yves Bertossa had launched.
In August 2018, Juan Carlos I signs a document where he states: “The donation on my part to Mrs. Corinna Zu Sayn-Witgestein was irrevocable.
The latter has never retained, since the donation, the transferred assets in my name.
I have not received any amount on my part, I have never asked for it”.
This statement by the emeritus king, made when it had not yet been discovered that he had had a hidden fortune in Switzerland, prevents accusing Corinna Larsen as figurehead of Juan Carlos I. What the document signed by the former monarch explains contrasts with what Larsen denounces now : When she denied him marriage in 2014, Juan Carlos I demanded that he return the multimillion-dollar gift.
Larsen's attorneys made another move to protect the client from her.
In March 2019, the ex-lover of Juan Carlos I sent a letter to Felipe VI in which he informed him of the existence of the Lucum Foundation, where the current King of Spain was listed as the first beneficiary after Juan Carlos I.
The Lucum Foundation was registered in Panama and was the owner of the 65 million euros that the King of Saudi Arabia gave in 2008 to the King Emeritus and that, in 2012, he transferred entirely to an account of Corinna Larsen in the Bahamas.
The ex-partner of Juan Carlos I explained in her letter to Felipe VI that the king emeritus had tried in 2014 to return the 65 million euros but that she refused to avoid "potential accusations of financial crimes."
The reason for the letter, she pointed out, was "to provide information of interest to the Kings" and to end the alleged "campaign of defamation and intimidation" that she had suffered for seven years.
The eight black boxes with the unspeakable secrets of the emeritus.
Corinna Larsen signed on April 9, 2019, when she was already being investigated for money laundering by the Swiss prosecutor's office, an affidavit in defense of commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who had been accused by the former director of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán.
Larsen assured in that affidavit that she had "information and documents related to financial and business negotiations of the king emeritus and other members of the Royal House."
It was “confidential information that Félix Sanz Roldan (former director of the CNI) tried to recover.”
The ex-lover of the emeritus king has never shown these documents, although she could do so to support her claim, in which she cites an episode of espionage in her home in Monaco where she kept eight black boxes with sensitive information: “Personal and private documents, official correspondence , confidential political reports and financial and commercial transactions in which the emeritus king and other members of the royal family had been involved.
Juan Carlos I, free of charges in Spain without explanation, will be investigated by a judge in the United Kingdom.
"Offenders remain unpunished"
On December 13, 2021, the Swiss prosecutor Yves Bertossa filed the open investigation for money laundering in relation to the hidden fortune of the king emeritus.
Corinna Larsen, after three years under suspicion, can breathe easy.
Nobody can take away the 65 million that the emeritus king never declared to the Spanish Treasury, avoiding the payment of more than 51 million in taxes, and that he transferred to Larsen in June 2012 forced by the Swiss bank where she kept those funds.
The businesswoman's reaction to the news of the end of the Swiss prosecutor's investigation without any reproach was a mixture of relief and dissatisfaction: “The offenders have not been investigated and have been given time to hide their activities.
They remain unpunished,” she said.
After the file, Larsen continues with his civil lawsuit where he claims a restraining order for Juan Carlos I – despite the fact that he knows that he resides in Abu Dhabi and with little chance of returning to settle in Europe – and compensation that has not been quantified .
A prosecutor consulted by EL PAÍS tries to explain this behavior: “Sometimes it is not a question of the money you ask for in the lawsuit, but of the facts that will come out in the judicial process.
The reparation is the truth declared in the sentence, the proven facts, it is not the money.
There are demands that ask for a euro”.
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