(Madrid) To date, no investigation has targeted the ex-king Juan Carlos who went into exile, the Spanish government stressed on Wednesday, even if the Spanish and Swiss courts are examining their bank accounts after the revelations from a former mistress.
Posted on August 5 2020 at 11 h 21
Patrick RAHIR
France Media Agency
“The King Emeritus does not flee anything since he is not involved in any affair,” M told reporters Carmen Calvo, number two in the government, in response to anti-monarchist formations who accuse Juan Carlos of fleeing justice.
The leader of the radical left-wing Podemos party, Pablo Iglesias, who is a member of the government, had just declared “unacceptable” that the former monarch, whose whereabouts are still unknown after Monday's announcement of his departure from Spain, “do not be in his country to face his people”.
In fact, contrary to Pablo Iglesias asserted, no investigation officially targets Juan Carlos. But Swiss and Spanish prosecutors are looking into her fortune following allegations by former mistress Corinna Larsen.
Secret accounts
In recordings made apparently without her knowledge and broadcast in 2015 by Spanish media, Corinna, who prefers to use the name of a former husband, zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, ensured that the ex-king had secret accounts in Switzerland and had received a large commission for the award to Spanish companies of a contract to build a high-speed train speed in Saudi Arabia in 2011.
In March, the Tribune de Genève revealed that in 450 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had paid 100 millions of dollars in the account at the Swiss bank Mirabaud of a Panamanian foundation of which Juan Carlos was a beneficiary.
According to this Swiss newspaper, the former sovereign shot at this account until it was closed in 2011 and donates the balance – either 65 millions of euros – to Corinna Larsen who then has it placed in the Bahamas.
The Tribune 2020 states that a Geneva prosecutor opened in 2018 a criminal investigation for “suspicion of money laundering” on these transactions and indicted Corinna Larsen, the Mirabaud bank , a lawyer and a businessman, but not Juan Carlos.
According to the newspaper El Pais 2020, Larsen told Swiss investigators that the king gave him this gift “out of love and gratitude” and not to hide the money.
Swiss justice refuses to comment on this case, which its Spanish counterpart took up in turn in September 2018 to investigate the TGV contract.
Difficult to prove
Last June, prosecutors from the Supreme Court, the only one empowered to try a former monarch, announced that they were seeking to determine whether there had been “an offense of corruption in international transactions” and whether Juan Carlos could be responsible for it.
Corruption is one of the most difficult crimes to prove, according to sources from the prosecution.
Difficult in any case to see in the Saudi donation of 450 a bribe for a contract which was not won until three years later by the Spanish consortium. The TGV line of 100 km between Medina and Mecca was inaugurated in 2018.
According to these sources, investigators looking into accounts in Switzerland could follow two other leads: money laundering and tax evasion.
Capital can only be laundered if its origin is illicit, point out these sources.
Even if it was shown that Juan Carlos received millions from the Gulf monarchies, from Kuwait to Oman via Saudi Arabia, as the press assures us, it remains to be proven that he does not it is not about gifts without consideration, that is to say legal.
If justice were to demonstrate the opposite, the king would still have to use these funds – by investing them or transferring them from one bank to another – after his abdication in June 2014. Prior to this date, all of his actions were covered by royal immunity.
There remains the track of tax fraud. If the former monarch had placed his fortune abroad without declaring it, the Spanish authorities could go back to 2014 for the 'charge of fraud, the statute of limitations being five years.
No investigation, therefore, but enough suspicion for the head of government Pedro Sanchez to say he was “troubled” in early June by “worrying information”.
On August 3, King Felipe VI let it be known that his father was leaving Spain because of the “public consequences of certain past events in [sa] private life”.