Two years and a few weeks ago, Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias left Spain and headed for the United Arab Emirates. The emeritus monarch was leaving Spain in the midst of a barrage of information about the dark management of his assets and his fortune for decades, and shortly before the Prosecutor’s Office made the opening of several branches of investigation against him official. Since then, the Public Ministry has definitively buried these criminal investigations against him, but that does not mean that his judicial path is clear: he still has pending accounts with the British courts for the harassment to which his lover Corinna Larsen was allegedly subjected. . A judicial process with no jail in sight but in which Juan Carlos I will not be protected by the inviolability of the crown that did save him from the bench in Spain for some of the causes that were being investigated.
The emeritus king will be able to appeal the ruling that denied him immunity in London for Corinna’s lawsuit
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It is a process that progresses at a slow pace in the British courts, where each step and each resource represent several months of hiatus. For the moment, the defense of the monarch emeritus has not achieved what he did in Madrid: avoid a lawsuit for the expiration of the process, for lack of evidence or for the immunity that protected him as head of state. The last known movement of the British Justice was to allow Juan Carlos I to file appeals against some decisions, but maintaining that he will be tried for the case of alleged harassment of the German aristocrat.
With the criminal front closed in Spain for the alleged concealment of his fortune abroad for decades, Juan Carlos de Borbón faces a civil proceeding in which he is exposed, in any case, to an economic sentence that serves to compensate the victim in case his guilt is proven.
It is a process in which the London judges have not yet examined the evidence and have not decided whether the harassment that Corinna Larsen denounces and in which she came to involve the former head of the secret services Félix Sanz Roldán is true or not, but in which the strategy of the monarch emeritus has received resounding setbacks. “I must emphasize that at this point there have been no decisions on whether the complainant’s allegations are true, the defendant denies wrongdoing,” he says. the last resolution of the case. in the last hours The world newspaper has published that Larsen has modified his demand and has left the institution of the CNI out of the range of accusations.
There is still no resolution on the merits of the matter, but there are decisions that leave the emeritus king without one of his best protections that have helped him avoid the bench in Spain: inviolability. The article of the Constitution that recognizes this privilege of the crown served him to avoid any non-prescribed accusation prior to his abdication in 2014, when most of the alleged irregularities in the management of his fortune took place. In the United Kingdom, however, that path has been denied: the judges have made it clear that he is not currently part of the Royal House nor is he protected by this article of the Magna Carta.
“He neither lives with his son, nor in the same country, nor does he play any role in his work,” Justices Underhill and Jackson said just a few weeks ago. For the second time, the British courts rejected that the monarch can avoid an accusation in this procedure for having been head of the Spanish State for several decades since the end of the dictatorship. In that country, as Justice Matthew Niklin explained a few months ago, the 1978 laws allow immunity to be applied, but not in any situation. “The accusation of harassment is not in the sphere of government activity or head of state” of the current monarch emeritus, explained the British magistrate.
Regardless of the evaluation they make of the evidence and whether they find him guilty or not, the king emeritus also has another option to try to be protected by some type of immunity: that Spain recognizes that this alleged harassment carried out by Félix Sanz Roldán, then director of the National Intelligence Center, was an official commission from the State, something that has not yet happened. For this, there should be a government willing to certify it, with the consequent scandal that this could mean for the coalition chaired by Sánchez. It remains to be seen how Larsen’s last move, excluding the CNIaffects this part of the process.
The president has publicly distanced himself several times from the behavior of the previous monarch, described as “disturbing” the information that became known about Juan Carlos I and the Executive has not concealed the discomfort that his return causes him, especially if that implies putting state resources at their disposal. So there is no indication that the Government is going to assume before a British court that the trips to London by the former head of the secret services to contact Larsen were on behalf of the State, even though these had taken place under the mandate of Mariano Rajoy and when the CNI depended on the vice president of that government, Soraya Saénz de Santamaría.
What appears in Larsen’s initial complaint is that, between 2012 and 2014, she was the victim of several acts of harassment both by her ex-lover and by Sanz Roldán, as well as episodes carried out by unknown persons but which she attributes to the action from both. According to the aristocrat, after the end of the sentimental relationship between the two, both she and her family began to be followed and threatened, with the use of State agents to carry out this intimidation that, according to her version, was intended to prevent that could spread compromising information for the monarch before and after his abdication.
The British courts still have to study appeals against these decisions and must decide if these accusations against the emeritus monarch are viable. In a process that is progressing very slowly in London, Juan Carlos de Borbón will not be able to hide behind immunity to avoid the bench and Corinna’s lawyers have already verbalized on occasion that they believe that the trial will be held in 2023.
Two related causes
The British courts will study exclusively if there is evidence that Juan Carlos de Borbón was behind the acts of harassment denounced by Corinna Larsen (if these have existed and can be proven), but the cause is closely related to the management of the fortune that he amassed behind the back of public opinion for decades. The documentation of the case processed in London shows overlaps between these alleged episodes of harassment and several milestones in the management of the millions that the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office in Madrid triple-investigated.
The aristocrat denounced intimidating actions allegedly carried out by Sanz Roldán and the monarch himself between 2012 and 2014. In one of them, for example, she affirms that Juan Carlos I demanded that she return the “gifts” that he had previously given her. That same year, Larsen had also rejected the king’s marriage proposal just months before his abdication.
The decrees of the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office that buried the accusations also show data that shows that the relationship between the two was not only sentimental. The fortune of Juan Carlos I passed through the accounts of Corinna Larsen. In June 2012, for example, the funds from the Ella Lucum de Ella Foundation reached an account opened in the Bahamas by the German aristocrat. More than 52 million euros together with 3.7 million Swiss francs and 14.4 million dollars.
This transfer became a problem for Juan Carlos I over the years. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, it was an “irrevocable donation” that could have been considered a money laundering crime, no matter how many years had passed. That accusation, which would have been enough to file a complaint against him, encountered an obstacle that the Prosecutor’s Office itself defines as “insurmountable”: the inviolability of the crown that still protected him at that time, two years before his abdication. . Years before, in 2006, Larsen had accompanied him to Saudi Arabia together with Spanish businessmen in the years prior to the award of the works of the Ave to Mecca.
It remains to be seen if the judicial process for the alleged harassment of her former lover goes into this facet of their relationship, but she makes it clear in her allegations included in the case: “The objective of the king emeritus was to find and eliminate any document that she related to his business and financial dealings, as well as to prevent her from providing information about anything that could incriminate him.” In this case, as the British courts have determined, the inviolability of the crown will not serve to avoid a sentence, be it favorable or unfavorable.
Meanwhile, Juan Carlos I is facing his second year in the Emirates, he sends messages to his friends about an imminent return that does not excite the Government or even the Royal House, very upset with the way his last visit to Spain was managed, where he arrived in a private jet, to participate in a sailing regatta in Sanxenxo, which he finally only witnessed. The debate about his return is periodically reopened in political and journalistic circles, who attend astonished at the end of the career of Juan Carlos I, a script of scandals, lovers and already prescribed tax crimes lived from exile where he faces his second season, now pending of an accusation of harassment in which the secret services are allegedly involved.
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