Date Published: 26/02/2021
ARCHIVED - Former Spanish monarch makes 4 million euro payment to the taxman
ARCHIVED ARTICLE The Spanish Prime Minister was quick to praise the exemplary conduct of his son, King Felipe VI today
Juan Carlos I left Spain in August last year and has since been living in Abu Dhabi. His lawyer said in a statement at the time that he remained at the disposal of the fiscal authorities for anything they may require of him.
The former king of Spain Juan Carlos I’s lawyer has confirmed that he has made a second payment to the Treasury to regularize his tax affairs.
The payment, amounting to 4,395,901.96 euros, seeks to make up for taxes on undeclared payments in kind – in the form of flights on private jets - through a foundation set up by Juan Carlos I’s cousin, Álvaro de Orleans.
King Felipe VI’s father had already handed over 678,393 euros in December 2020 to regularise his tax affairs with regards to payments made using cards funded by a Mexican businessman between 2016 and 2018.
The former King’s finances have been the subject of numerous accusations in recent years and this apparent admission of irregularities relates to the use of anonymous credit cards, by means of which he is reported in the press to have incurred between 1.2 million and 2 million euros in undeclared expenses and gifts. The allegation is that these cards enabled Juan Carlos to make use of hidden funds supplied by the Mexican businessman Allen Sanginés-Krause, but by making his declaration to Hacienda before being legally required to do so it seems probable that the former monarch has avoided being formally charged with tax evasion.
The credit cards concerned were used between 2016 and 2018, after the abdication and therefore at a time when Juan Carlos no longer enjoyed immunity from prosecution. Had the case been brought to trial the amount of the spending is sufficient for a guilty sentence to have resulted in a sentence of up to five years in prison.
However, the Emeritus King is still under investigation on two other fronts, one related to kick-backs he is alleged to have received from commercial contracts in the Gulf States including the construction of the Haramain AVE high-speed railway in Saudi Arabia, and the other in relation to reports that he attempted to move almost 10 million euros from an account in Jersey.
It is also known that until 2018 Juan Carlos held a bank account in Switzerland containing almost 8 million dollars and at the same time he is named as a beneficiary of the Zagatka Foundation, from which he is alleged to have received 4.3 million dollars in 2009. Other reports claim that after a private trip to Kazakhstan in 2002 he was the recipient of briefcases holding 5 million dollars in cash, and the investigations into a Panamanian Lucum foundation funded by the Saudi royal family are also under way.
Juan Carlos I, once a revered figure in Spain, fell from grace as details of his lavish and sometimes scandalous lifestyle (including a penchant for hunting elephants and that for many years he kept a mistress, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn,) were made public.
He abdicated in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe VI, who formally renounced his inheritance and stripped his father of his annual stipend from the Royal Household in March last year.
Spanish President Pedro Sánchez spoke out this morning (26 February) to condemn what he referred to as the former king’s “uncivil behaviour” but was quick to defend and praise King Felipe VI. He stressed that the current king’s behaviour is an exercise in exemplariness and transparency and that it is a single individual’s past actions that are under question, not the institution that he represented for 40 years.