20 years ago, on May 22, 2004, Princes Felipe and Letizia got married. We know this because the event was lavish. It was broadcast around the world and cost between 20 and 40 million euros. The real budget is still unknown today, despite being public funds. The next day it monopolized all the covers. “The kings of the 21st century,” headlined El País. “A yes in the rain”, El Mundo did. The rain was what had fallen in Madrid the day before, not what was falling behind the scenes and which would take years to set in.
We also know this because these days there have been multiple television specials remembering the event, as well as the content in all media. Even from Casa Real the anniversary was celebrated last week with a dozen photographs of the now kings Felipe and Letizia and their daughters, Leonor and Sofía, posing in the gardens surrounding the Royal Palace, where the banquet was held.
But it is not the only twentieth anniversary that is celebrated. Also that of the honeymoon, which began two days later, on May 24, in Cuenca. “Few countries can offer riches in their heritage like Spain,” it was announced from Casa Real then, to praise why the newlyweds began their honeymoon there. We also know it because, in addition to Zarzuela, the media told it. After Cuenca they would travel to Teruel, Zaragoza, prayer to the Virgin of Pilar included, Navarra and Euskadi. Few countries could offer riches like those of Spain. But they weren’t enough… And that’s what we didn’t know.
Throughout his reign, Juan Carlos I made two types of trips. Some, the officers, are the ones who carried him like king throughout Spain and the world, from inaugurations of new presidents in Latin America to trips with businessmen to open businesses for Spanish companies. Information about them was reported from the Royal House or the Government.
The others, the private ones, numerous, took him to all kinds of places and for unknown reasons, because they were never reported on. In one of them in 2012 in Botswana he broke his hip on an elephant safari today cursed for the crown. In another, ten years earlier, in Kazakhstan, the king went hunting wild goats but not only returned intact, but richer with a briefcase containing five million dollars in cash as a gift from the Kazakh president. Today we know it because we tell it in elDiario.es.
‘Mr and Mrs Smith’
Felipe and Letizia’s honeymoon replicated the model that worked so well for King Juan Carlos for decades. An official trip, through Spain, as reported, and which continued in Jordan, where Prince Hamzah and Princess Noor were married, who a few days before attended the royal wedding in Madrid. Nothing was known about what happened next. Only a month after traveling to Cuenca, the princes returned to work in Madrid.
We know what happened in those weeks today, but not because of the Royal Family, but because it was published in England, many years later, in 2020, The Telegraph. The private trip, which was not reported in Zarzuela because it was just that, private, and for, as justified, “preserving the privacy” of the newlyweds, had not taken Felipe and Letizia on a visit to the rich Spanish heritage, but ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’, as they were called in code, through Fiji, Samoa, the United States and Mexico on a trip of absolute luxury. So much so that it cost nearly half a million euros: $467,000.
Almost half of the money, 200,000 dollars (170,000 euros in 2004) was paid by King Juan Carlos. That 2004 must have been a good year for him, because apart from that money he lent 1,200,000 euros to his daughter Cristina to buy the house in Pedralbes, in Barcelona, where her family lived and where she and Iñaki Urdangarin developed the now famous Nóos Institute for which her husband ended up in jail and she was convicted and fined as co-responsible for a tax crime. In 2004 the king’s salary was still secret. It would be revealed for the first time in 2011, precisely when Urdangarin had just been charged: 292,000 gross euros. If seven years before King Juan Carlos already had a similar salary, that 2004 he spent, between the honeymoon and the loan for the house, his entire salary of eight years. That, of course, if the money came from his official assets, because today we also know that it was negligible compared to what was hidden in tax havens. As with travel, there were some official savings and other private ones.
The other part of the trip, $269,000, was paid for by Josep Cusí, Juan Carlos’s closest friend, through his company Navilot. A gift of almost a quarter of a million euros, therefore, from a businessman to the Prince of Asturias, future head of State. To the same Felipe who ten years later, in 2014, after his coronation, approved a code of conduct for the Royal House in which it is established that the members of the house and its workers “will reject any gift, favor or service under advantageous conditions that go beyond the usual, social and courtesy uses.”
Ten years earlier, either the code was not applied or courtesy was very high. In either case, the gift had to be declared to the Tax Agency. Wedding gifts must be declared through gift and inheritance tax. Smaller amounts, those normally made by wedding guests, are not exempt, but, as the Treasury technicians explain, they are usually not checked. From a gift of 3,000 euros, both in cash and in kind, such as a car, a property or a luxury trip, not declaring it is considered a serious offense. This multiplied by 150 the amount of courtesy, or the limit of gravity.
Corinna Larsen’s revelations
We know about this other honeymoon, the private one, today only because it was published in the English newspaper. The news, however, did not appear the next day on the front page of any of the Spanish newspapers. But we know her, above all, because there was a person who wanted us to know her and who leaked it to the British newspaper: Corinna Larsen.
In 2020, Larsen was no longer the “close friend,” as she was called in the Spanish press, of King Juan Carlos, the woman with whom the monarch had maintained a romantic relationship for years and with whom he had, literally, a double life, sharing a house with her in the El Pardo natural park, a few kilometers from Zarzuela. She had already become his intimate enemy and in that year 2020 she became his public enemy. That spring of 2020, Larsen changed her strategy. If until then she maintained a hidden struggle with King Juan Carlos over the 100 million dollars that he had received from Saudi Arabia, which he had transferred to her and which he demanded back, she now began to include King Felipe in her dispute as well. . Her sights were diverted from King Juan Carlos to aim at the crown.
As it did? With the information she had: filtering it. First, that Felipe appeared as a beneficiary of two foundations with million-dollar funds hidden in tax havens: the Lukum foundation in Panama and Zagatka in Liechtenstein. It was the news that triggered, in the middle of the pandemic, parallel to the declaration of the state of alarm, the reaction from King Felipe’s Zarzuela, publicly punishing his father by withdrawing her salary and renouncing his inheritance. Furthermore, it was announced from the palace, in a statement, because the king has never referred to it, that the monarch was unaware of his participation in those foundations and that after discovering it he had given orders to be eliminated from them.
According to the Zarzuela story, King Felipe knew about it a year before and went to a notary to disappear as a beneficiary. According to the story because no evidence was provided to confirm it. Even today, four years later, there is only the explanation, but no document that supports it. We know the announcement from Zarzuela, the story, in any case, because Larsen leaked the information to the media. It did not occur a year earlier, when Larsen’s lawyers communicated it to Casa Real, as a not-so-subtle threat of the arsenal that she could have and use. She only reacted officially and publicly when she had no choice but to do so. Otherwise, she would have remained private.
Weeks later, Larsen once again targeted the current kings. Again, as with the hidden foundations, with facts that question or overshadow the “exemplarity” that politicians and the media uncritically praise of King Philip and with which they differentiate him from his father to protect him. Now Larsen was shooting with the honeymoon as ammunition, with the other honeymoon, the one he had kept secret. And he knew the details well because she was the one who planned it. At that time he worked organizing luxury safaris and King Juan Carlos, who already had a relationship with her, asked him to organize the trip secretly. “I barely slept. She did not separate me from the dossiers and was very worried that nothing would be leaked,” Larsen told this journalist about that ‘mission’ that King Juan Carlos entrusted to him. She added that it had been very difficult for her to organize such a trip around the world, in contact with the embassies and without it becoming known.
Of course, it didn’t come out. And so it would have continued, without transcending, if it weren’t for her. “Yet another embarrassment for King Philip,” The Telegraph subtitled its exclusive on the wedding. The king had publicly punished his father, renouncing his inheritance, but years before she embarked on an exclusive trip paid for by him with funds whose origin is unknown.
No explanations have ever been given about that honeymoon since Zarzuela. Nor about the doubts that he raises, beyond the obvious ones in the specific case of the trip. We know that gift today only because Larsen presented it. Because the honeymoon of 2004 was transformed in 2020 into his war against Juan Carlos in a ice moon. But how many more gifts were there? Of what amounts? Who paid them? Did any of them declare themselves? Twenty years after that first night at the Parador in Cuenca, few countries offer the riches of Spain, we still don’t know it.
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