These days Juan Carlos I sells memoirs of imprecise memories and surprising forgetfulness. “Reconciliation”, as the book is titled, seems at times more like a settling of accounts. “My father always advised me not to write my memoirs. Kings do not confess. And even less so publicly. Their secrets remain buried in the shadows of the palaces. Why do I disobey him today? Why have I changed my mind? Because I feel like they are stealing my story,” Juan Carlos I justifies in the paragraph with which he promotes a book that will go on sale in Spain on December 3. Some secrets of the emeritus king remained buried for a long time, but not in the darkness of the palaces but in Swiss banks. In this way, the Spanish Tax Agency would not be able to collect the taxes due on his fortune hidden abroad.
In his memoirs, the monarch launches some reproaches, based on false premises, against political protagonists in the recent history of Spain. Juan Carlos forcibly abdicated in 2014, humiliated by his inappropriate behavior, although nothing was known then about his hidden fortunes in Switzerland. And he fled Spain six years later, in August 2020, to take up residence in Abu Dhabi after an ongoing judicial investigation that snooped into his most unspeakable financial adventures. In the book that he is now selling so that his history is not stolen, Juan Carlos I states: “The Government (of Pedro Sánchez) transformed these legal investigations into a witch hunt, into a moral judgment that affected the entirety of my reign and my political action.” This attack includes those who supposedly discredited him for no reason, including Dolores Delgado, Minister of Justice (2018-2020) and Attorney General of the State between 2020 and 2022.
The judicial history of the Juan Carlos I case tells a very different story. Twelve years before his self-exile, the monarch accepted a gift of $100 million – he now believes it was a mistake – from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Arabia. In that summer of 2008, the king of Spain kept his fortune in a Swiss bank and in the name of a foundation domiciled in Panama. If he had deposited the money in a Spanish bank and declared that donation to the Treasury, Juan Carlos would have paid 51 million euros in taxes.
The Swiss manager of that operation was called Arturo Fasana and he also managed other Spanish fortunes in an account called “soleado”. Some of these fortunes corresponded to businessmen involved in the Gürtel case that affected numerous governments and leaders of the PP.
The king's dealings in Switzerland did not become known until ten years later, when a recording of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo with Corinna Larsen, ex-lover of Juan Carlos I, was published in July 2018. The conversation suggested money laundering by the King of Spain, but the investigating judge of the National Court with the impetus of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office archived the case opened by that recording in September 2018. The closure arrived in just 56 days and without carrying out any due diligence.
The Government of Pedro Sánchez did not say a single word about that hasty file nor did it promote, as far as is known, any initiative to reopen a case with sufficient evidence of the illegal dealings of Juan Carlos I.
The argument of judges and prosecutors was that the recording did not seem to be sufficient evidence, that the evidence was very weak and that the events reported corresponded to a time in which Juan Carlos I was protected by the inviolability that the Constitution establishes. The investigating judge questioned Villarejo and the Tax Agency answered that he was not aware that Juan Carlos I had accounts abroad. With these procedures, he forgot about the matter without listening to what the ex-lover or the alleged front men had to say.
Despite the file, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office kept open a line of investigation into King Juan Carlos's private businesses abroad and, at the same time, the Swiss prosecutor's office investigated on its own by entering into the secrets that the banks of that country kept about the hidden fortune of the King of Spain.
The lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Juan Ignacio Campos, who died in December 2021, investigated the hidden fortune of the emeritus king and sent his lawyer, Javier Sánchez Junco, notifications of the three pre-procedural investigations opened against Juan Carlos I in June, November and December 2020. The press, with very little information from the investigation, published the existing suspicions about the emeritus king. Although someone in the Prosecutor's Office planned to summon the king emeritus to testify in the open pre-trial proceedings, that possibility was rejected to avoid “a media circus.”
In this extreme situation, with the monarch fleeing to Abu Dhabi, his lawyer presented a tax regularization for 638,393 euros on December 9, 2020. These were the taxes not paid at the time by the king on account of the donation that a Mexican businessman had made to him through a front man. Just two months later, in February 2021, lawyer Sánchez Junco made another regularization for almost 4.4 million euros corresponding to unpaid taxes on gifts from his cousin Álvaro de Orleans, who had paid for Juan Carlos I's private flights from the Zagatka Foundation for several years. At the window of the Ministry of Finance, led by the socialist María Jesús Montero, they did not object to the operation despite the fact that the law states that if a taxpayer has an open or ongoing inspection by the Prosecutor's Office, it is no longer possible to settle accounts and a trial must be opened. The emeritus king was lucky because neither the Government of Pedro Sánchez nor the Prosecutor's Office that was investigating him, then directed by Dolores Delgado, objected to a regularization that freed him from a certain prison sentence.
The Supreme Court Prosecutor's Office archived the three pre-procedural investigations opened against Juan Carlos I. It did so in April 2021, with Dolores Delgado as attorney general and with the Government of Pedro Sánchez completely inactive in relation to that case. The Prosecutor's Office defended that the tax crimes of Juan Carlos I by hiding in Switzerland the fortune that the King of Arabia gave him were not prosecutable because in that period (from 2008 to 2012, the year in which the king decided to donate all the money he kept in Switzerland in favor of Corinna Larsen) he enjoyed inviolability. That issue was never sufficiently clarified by the main interpreter of the Constitution. The Constitutional Court has not yet ruled on the scope of inviolability and has not resolved the doubt about whether all the King's acts are also protected by that right. Prestigious jurists maintain that the private conduct of King Juan Carlos—such as hiding a gift of 100 million dollars in Switzerland and not declaring that donation in Spain to avoid paying taxes—cannot be protected by inviolability.
The Government of Mariano Rajoy (2012-2018) promoted a small reform, agreed upon with the PSOE, to protect Juan Carlos I after his abdication in June 2014. At that time there were two civil lawsuits filed against the king for paternity lawsuits. The then Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón, urgently drafted a modification of the Organic Law of the Judiciary so that any complaint against Juan Carlos I could only be investigated in the Supreme Court. In the preamble of that reform, without legal effects, an interpretation on the scope of inviolability was introduced for the first time: “In accordance with the terms of the constitutional text, all acts carried out by the King or Queen during the time in which they hold the head of the State, whatever their nature, are protected by inviolability and are exempt from responsibility.”
The filing of all the investigations opened in the Prosecutor's Office against Juan Carlos I did not avoid a serious reproach to the monarch for his financial management during various stages of his reign. But the prescription of some of the crimes committed, the shield of inviolability that protected him during the 39 years of his reign (1975-2014) and a more than dubious extraordinary regularization saved the king from prison for money laundering, tax fraud and bribery.
Everything the powers of the State could do (including the Sánchez Government) did to spare King Juan Carlos a drink (the conviction for tax fraud punishable by several years in prison) even more humiliating and bitter than his flight to Abu Dhabi for betraying his country with dishonest conduct.