The management of Juan Carlos de Borbón’s fortune returns to court. The complaint filed by former prosecutors and judges as well as other jurists and intellectuals puts the Supreme Court before the decision of opening proceedings against the emeritus king that Anti-Corruption flatly rejected two and a half years ago. This judicial action denounces that the monarch received favored treatment in his multiple tax regularizations and demands an effective investigation with almost all the antecedents against: from the decrees of the Prosecutor’s Office that archived the case before prosecuting it to previous decisions of the court denying the opening of a criminal case against the father of Felipe VI, going through the protection of his inviolability.
The Prosecutor’s Office investigated the king emeritus for a year and nine months. Procedures that, much of the time, were carried out by a team of prosecutors led by Juan Ignacio Campos and that investigated in three directions: the commission of 65 million euros that Juan Carlos de Borbón charged for his role in the award to companies Spanish trains on the AVE to Mecca, managing their fortune in a trust on the island of Jersey and the use of opaque backgrounds revealed by elDiario.es.
The investigation served to leave black on white many things that until then were part of the mysticism that for decades surrounded the entire ‘B side’ of Juan Carlos de Borbón’s life. For example, that the monarchy of Saudi Arabia actually paid him tens of millions of euros and that he moved that money between his then lover, Corinna Larsen, and accounts in the Bahamas or Switzerland. Also that he amassed several million euros in various funds in tax havens since at least the 1990s. And that several businessmen were taking care of his expenses when he left the throne: hundreds of thousands of euros, especially in travel.
All this happened while Spain was mired in one of the worst economic crises in its history. Behind the back of Spanish society, which could only know minimal details of his love life, but also behind the back of the Treasury. It was in March 2022 when the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office established that the king could have committed various crimes, but that he was irrevocably protected: by the immunity that protected him while he was on the throne, by the prescription of the time spent while he was untouchable and Finally, for the maneuvers of his defense to pay his debts to the Treasury in injury time.
The complaint focuses on the tax crimes that the emeritus, as the Prosecutor’s Office itself recognized, could have committed in those years while managing his fortune outside the reach of the Treasury. And he understands that the facts have not yet prescribed. And it focuses on the fact that the authorities allowed Juan Carlos de Borbón to regularize his tax debts after his defense was notified that he was being investigated. A legal exemption that, according to the signatory jurists, should not have been applied.
Notices from the Prosecutor’s Office
The Prosecutor’s Office justified that its notices do not prevent it from taking advantage of the legal articles that allow a criminal case for tax fraud to be avoided if it is paid before knowing that an investigation is underway. In none of its notifications to the monarch’s defense, said the Public Ministry, “was there any reference to the facts to which the tax declarations are made for the simple reason that at that time the circumstances to which they were related were unknown. refer.”
The complaint understands that “five crimes have been committed against the Public Treasury” that were not regularized correctly, but “after having had formal knowledge of the existence of Investigation Procedures of the Prosecutor’s Office that warned him of the existence of irregularities.” in the tax returns, prior to their regularization.” More than 3.5 million euros of fraud between 2014 and 2018 alone.
His regularizations, says the complaint, were neither complete nor spontaneous and the king emeritus had “punctual knowledge” of the opening of the different proceedings opened by the Prosecutor’s Office and chose not to appear, but to plug the leaks of his finances to, Finally, avoid the bench. The Prosecutor’s Office itself recognized in its archiving decrees that the amounts allegedly defrauded exceeded the threshold of crimes against the Public Treasury, but that the prescription, immunity and these regularizations closed the way to any complaint or complaint.
The new complaint filed before the Supreme Court combats this statement and explains that by the time Juan Carlos I paid the Treasury he already had “formal knowledge, not necessarily detailed” of the case opened against him in the Public Ministry. The complaint cites a 2019 Supreme Court ruling presented by elDiario.es during the processing of the case: any notification to the investigated party of the existence of proceedings, even if “it is not totally precise”, represents an “automatic block” in the face of a possible peaceful regularization .
This criminal action filed a few months after the statute of limitations of the facts, therefore, confronts the decisions of the Prosecutor’s Office with the doctrine of the Supreme Court on tax crimes. “For now, no Spanish judge has said whether or not Juan Carlos de Borbón has to answer for the crimes committed. His case was closed before that because, simply, he was not even accused,” explains Joaquín Urías, professor of Constitutional Law and one of the signatories of the complaint.
“We simply want a judge to say whether or not Juan Carlos de Borbón can benefit from an amnesty for the crimes against public finances that he committed between 2014 and 2019,” says Urías. On other occasions, prior to obtaining all this information, both the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have rejected the opening of cases against the emeritus. Now the judges, with much more data than then, will have to justify whether their doctrine on tax regularizations can also be applied to the millionaire payments by Juan Carlos de Borbón when he already knew that there were proceedings open against him, key to his being able to avoid the bench to date.
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