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The secret audios of corruption: chapter 4
Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo informed Dolores de Cospedal, then general secretary of the PP, in September 2017 about the hidden fortune of Juan Carlos I in Switzerland, two and a half years before the first news about those millionaire funds of the king emeritus emerged. .
The fortune was hidden in an account managed by Arturo Fasanna in a Swiss bank.
This manager also controlled other accounts grouped under the name of Soleado, where he hid millionaire funds from Spanish businessmen and politicians linked to the
Gürtel case.
EL PAÍS revealed for the first time on March 3, 2020 that a Swiss prosecutor, Yves Bertossa, was investigating the donation of 65 million euros from Juan Carlos I to his lover, Corinna Larsen.
The emeritus hid this enormous amount of money, a gift from the king of Saudi Arabia in August 2008, in the Swiss bank Mirabaud account managed by the lawyer Dante Canonica, who put it in the name of the Lucum foundation, and by the manager Arturo Fasanna , the same person who dealt with other Spanish fortunes in the Soleado account.
Prosecutor Bertossa found the documentary evidence of the hidden fortune of Juan Carlos I in the fall of 2018, during the searches of the offices of Fasanna and Canonica.
Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo knew details of these money movements of the king emeritus well in advance because Corinna Larsen told him, with whom he met on at least three occasions (April and June 2015 and October 2016).
Already in March 2016, Villarejo boasted in a meeting with Ignacio Peláez, lawyer for different defendants in the
Gürtel case
and who died a year later, of having sensitive information about the king emeritus.
A year and a half after that talk with Peláez, the commissioner called Cospedal and recorded the conversation, which is part of the material seized by the police to which EL PAÍS and the digital newspaper
Fuentes Informadas have had access.
The commissioner spoke to Cospedal about the
Andorra case
— the Spanish police revealed in the summer of 2014 the hidden fortune of the former Catalan president, Jordi Pujol — and the missed opportunity to deal a heavy blow to Catalan independence.
The commissioner planned to spread the identity of 4,000 Catalans who had money in the same bank in Andorra that Jordi Pujol used.
The data of the 4,000 Catalan accounts was never confirmed.
Villarejo told Cospedal that it was the director of the CNI who frustrated that idea to protect the Swiss funds of the emeritus king.
The commissioner considered that the director of the CNI stopped the operation to make these Catalan accounts public in Andorra because the investigation could end up splashing Juan Carlos I, given that transfers of money to Swiss accounts managed by Fasanna would appear, the same one that was in charge of the fortune of the king emeritus.
Two months before that conversation with Cospedal, Commissioner Villarejo called Ignacio López del Hierro, businessman and partner of the then general secretary of the PP, in July 2017 to tell him about his encounter with the director of the CNI, whom he had accused of threatening to the king's ex-lover.
The commissioner reiterated that same message to Cospedal when he called her in September...
The commissioner reminds Cospedal that he denounced some investigations in the Prevention and Money Laundering Service (Sepblac), dependent on the Ministry of Economy, on alleged companies of Juan Carlos I abroad.
Sepblac investigated companies abroad belonging to the emeritus king, as it later became known.
Last March, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor filed open proceedings after a complaint by Sepblac about the existence of a
trust
called
The JRM 2004 trust
, established on March 8, 2004 in Jersey by Joaquín Romero Maura with an amount of 10.2 million euros.
Sepblac indicated that the ultimate owner of the
trust
funds could be Juan Carlos I. Anticorruption investigated the facts and confirmed that the original owner of the funds was Juan Carlos I, although the crimes had prescribed and, furthermore, when events occurred, the emeritus was protected by inviolability.
The PP government never denounced the facts about the king emeritus that Villarejo transferred to Cospedal in September 2017. Only two months later, the police arrested the commissioner by order of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which had been secretly investigating him since April of that year.
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