Nothing is going well in Spain! Former magistrates of the Supreme Court, emeritus members of the National Court of Justice, retired anti-corruption judges, law professors but also philosophers and journalists have filed a complaint against Juan Carlos I for five tax offenses corresponding to the years between 2014 and 2018.
At that time, the former sovereign used credit cards in the name of third parties and had a large part of his expenses financed by the Zagakta foundation, owned by his cousin Alvaro de Borbon, without the sums spent appearing as donations in his tax returns. In 2020, after the affair came to light, Felipe VI’s father made two payments for a total of nearly five million euros, in order to regularize his situation with the tax authorities.
According to the complainants, these two regularizations would not be legal insofar as they were carried out after the opening of a tax investigation for which the former king would have received two notifications from the administration in the space of six months.
According to José Antonio Martín Pallín, one of the plaintiffs and former magistrate of the Supreme Court, “to be valid (therefore decriminalizing), regularization must occur before the opening of a procedure by the tax services”.
A criminal procedure triggered by popular action
If Juan Carlos I’s payments were validated in 2022 by the state attorney general, the complaint report recalls that it is up to the judicial bodies to determine, independently of the prosecutor’s office, “whether the regularization is legal or not “.
Carlos Jiménez Villarejo and José María Mena, former anti-corruption judges, joined the process, making it known that popular action is enough to trigger criminal proceedings.
The plaintiffs are therefore asking that the former head of state be summoned to court along with around ten people linked to the companies and foundations that covered his expenses or managed his fortune abroad. Besides Alvaro de Borbon, this concerns the businessman. In this affair, Corinna Zu-Sayn-Wittgenstein, the king’s former mistress, is a prime witness since it was based on recordings made without her knowledge that the tax authorities launched their investigation at the end of the 2010s.
