“We are motivated by the defense of the general interest to the extent that we believe that crimes against the Public Treasury are necessary which violate not only the precepts of the Penal Code that we will invoke but also the principles of equality and solidarity , in addition to legal rights and ethical obligations, particularly applicable to “people who occupy public positions relevant to the constitution, in this case, the head of state”.
It is with these words that the complaint filed by a group of jurists and intellectuals present this Monday before the Supreme Court against King Juan Carlos I, accused of five crimes of tax evasion, and who also contests the regularization before the Treasure carried out in 2021, Which the prosecution accepted and served to close the investigation into the Emeritus King.
Among the signatories of the document that the Public Ministry intends to exercise are the former prosecutors Carlos Jiménez Villarejo and José María Mena, the former judges of the Supreme Court José Antonio Martín Pallín and Clemente Auger, jurists such as Javier Pérez Royo, Blanca Rodríguez Ruiz, Joaquín Urías and Eduardo Ranz Alonso, intellectuals like Josep Ramoneda and Pilar del Río and the journalist Miguel Morah.
Over 20 pages, the complaint addressed to the Supreme Court details the five crimes attributed to the previous monarch between 2014, the date of his abdication and 2018, and which it considers prescribed, and at the same time attempts to dismantle the criteria which led to the prosecutor’s office to accept the regularization before the Treasury that Juan Carlos I carried out in 2021 when he already knew that he was under investigation for fraud tax.
The facts reported are linked to the use of opaque instruments, including the Zagatka and Lucum foundations (based in Liechtenstein and Switzerland) to “hide or make difficult the amount of the defrauded sums”. The plaintiffs say this behavior should be classified as aggravated tax fraud, punishable by two to six years in prison and that it will not be statute-barred until a decade later. Thus, according to their accounts, none of the five declared years, not even 2014, whose declaration deadline expired on July 1, 2015, would be prescribed.
The complaint recalls that in 2018, four years after his abdication, investigations were opened into the assets of Juan Carlos I and that in 2020 the State Attorney General, Dolores Delgado, ordered that an investigation be opened by Anti-Corruption be transmitted to the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office. Bureau a year ago on alleged credit cards linked to the funds of Mexican businessman Allen Sanginés-Krause, by the king and other relatives, and an alleged collection of illegal commissions. in the works on Avenue de la Mecca and the existence of companies in tax havens.
The popular accusation recalls that the tax regularization carried out by King Juan Carlos took place after the public prosecutor’s office notified him twice that he was under investigation. It was then, between December 2020 and February 2021, that the Emeritus King deposited 4,416,717.46 euros to fulfill the tax obligations that he had not covered in the declarations to the Treasury corresponding to the 2014-2018 five-year term, when the monarch no longer enjoyed inviolability after bequeathing the Crown to his son Felipe VI. The additional declarations include one to cover taxes from payments made by the Zagatka foundation, which was managed by a cousin of the king – Álvaro de Orleáns -, to cover travel and other services enjoyed by Juan Carlos I, including the hunting of weapons. amount greater than 100,000 euros.
It is these regularizations before the Treasury which are contested by the complaint filed before the Supreme Court and which leads the popular accusation to consider that the emeritus king should be tried for five offenses against the Public Treasury. The complaint supports it with these words: “The regularization of tax fraud comes after having formal knowledge of the existence of an investigation procedure by the Public Prosecutor’s Office which warned him of the existence of irregularities in the tax declarations, before regularization. In any case, his legal representative had the opportunity to appear and become acquainted with the content of the investigative procedure, even though he was undoubtedly aware of the irregularities committed in the individuals’ tax returns physical corresponding to the years 2014 to 2018.
For this reason, specifies the complaint, “the application of the principle of full and spontaneous regularization provided for in the Penal Code does not apply” to the offense of tax fraud. In the opinion of the People’s Procuratorate, the argument according to which the prosecutor’s office then considered that the regularization had been carried out on time and that it was based on the fact that the two notifications did not detail the alleged facts in detail, “is incongruous.” The legal representative of the King Emeritus, specifies the complaint, “carried out the regularization with the data which had been provided to him by the public prosecutor’s office and more particularly the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office”. “The Penal Code excludes decriminalizing effects if it is regularized after having had formal knowledge, not necessarily detailed, of the opening of the procedure”, underline the complainants, who cite the case law of the Supreme Court to support their thesis according to which this regularization was never due. as good
Their conclusion is therefore that the Supreme Court must investigate the tax crimes and to do so, it requests that King Juan Carlos I be declared accused, and that his cousin, Álvaro de Orleans, who paid for the private flights and weapons of the previous monarch, appearing as witnesses, the lawyer who represented the emeritus in his tax investigation, Javier Sánchez-Junco, and some of the names who managed the king’s finances in Switzerland like Arturo Fasana and Dante Canonica. It is also requested to summon as witnesses the Mexican businessman Allen Jesús Sanginés-Krause, who allegedly paid part of the expenses of the emeritus king and his family, as well as representatives of banks, companies and agencies Swiss travel.
The group of jurists and intellectuals who sign the complaint ask the Supreme Court to set a symbolic deposit of one euro, because its objective is to “valorize the higher value of justice, the general principles of the rule of law and equality before the law. »
In the last point, the complaint proposes that, when the appropriate procedural moment comes, in the event of conviction, the minimum possible prison sentence be fixed “taking into account the age of the defendant, but that the fine be “the amount maximum” established by law. »
