2023-10-06 22:08:27
Judicial fortune has once again smiled on Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón. After the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office closed the three investigations that were open into the irregular management of his fortune in 2022, the British courts have decided to reject the harassment accusations of his ex-partner Corinna Larsen, understanding that the lawsuit is not the jurisdiction of the London judges. The judicial horizon of the emeritus king is clear as he makes his visits to Galicia more and more common with the question of whether he will leave Abu Dhabi to return to Spain.
The emeritus king tries to normalize his visits to Spain three years after his departure and despite the distance from his son
Pontifying about what the emeritus king will do or intend to do always requires a certain degree of speculation. Very few know what their next step will be and, following their fait accompli policy, the Spanish population has learned of their movements when they had already occurred. For example, when he left Zarzuela to settle on the luxurious island of Nurai, or when he moved tens of millions of euros abroad, enriching himself massively while he was sitting on the throne and Spain was going through the worst economic crisis in its history.
A first statement from the British law firm that handled his defense expressed, among other things, that the emeritus monarch considered that “justice” had been done. Other quoted by the newspaper ABC It was much more explicit: “Today’s decision, favorable to His Majesty, reestablishes the necessary conditions for future public appearances.”
What is a fact is that his visits to Spain, and specifically to Galicia and Sanxenxo aboard the sailboat Bribón, have been increasing as his judicial fronts have been resolved in his favor. His fourth stay in Galicia since he began his (supposedly voluntary) exile culminated with an answer to the question of whether he wants to live in Spain again: “Of course.”
That “of course” joins a long list of brief statements to the microphones during his last visits to the country whose Head of State he held for almost four decades, some more cryptic than others. At the beginning of this year, however, he took a step in the opposite direction and announced that he would be considered a tax resident in Abu Dhabi. At that time there was no longer a criminal investigation against him for his hidden fortune but the lawsuit for harassing his ex-partner Corinna Larsen was still being processed in the London courts.
The emeritus king left Spain in the summer of 2020, when information about his fortune pointed to a string of irregularities. He left shortly before the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office opened a triple case against his assets and also before Larsen, with whom he had a romantic relationship for five years, filed a civil lawsuit in which he demanded more than 145 million euros for harassment.
The “mini-trial” on harassment
His last victory arrived this friday from London. Judge Rowena Collins Rice dismissed Corinna Larsen’s lawsuit with one main reason: the British Justice Department is not competent to study her complaint. In 92 pages, the judge examines whether the acts of harassment that the Danish aristocrat denounced occurred in the United Kingdom, at least enough to declare the jurisdiction of her courts, and the answer is no. She has not “identified or described,” the resolution says, events that have continually unfolded in London. She “may have experienced or reacted to acts of the defendant when she was in England. But that is not the same as experiencing the act of harassment in England and not anywhere else,” she explains.
The question remains whether Larsen will present some type of appeal or if he will direct his civil lawsuit to another country, be it Spain or Monaco. In a statement, the businesswoman showed her discontent with the decision and announced that she was considering “all possible options.” But Judge Collins’ ruling went into her specific allegations of harassment and left little room for interpretation.
After stating that she refused to hold a “mini-trial,” the London judge begins to examine Larsen’s allegations about the harassment she claims to have suffered and the psychological consequences it had for her. Especially taking into account, says the magistrate, the changes that she introduced throughout the process to redirect the lawsuit: “No evidence is offered that the alleged conduct was carried out not only in a deliberate, persistent, oppressive and with a view to a financially advantageous outcome, but also with the additional intention of inflicting psychiatric harm or serious distress,” he reproaches.
Larsen, baptized by many as a “friend of the king” despite having acknowledged a romantic relationship with him from 2004 to 2009 with subsequent meetings, maintained that in 2012 the monarch and his entourage began a strategy of harassment against her with several objectives: to avoid the leak of compromising data, resuming their romantic relationship and also recovering more than 60 million euros that he gave him in a tax haven behind the back of the Treasury.
The triple investigation in Spain
Juan Carlos de Borbón has nothing to fear in London, but neither in Madrid. This is how his defense sources interpret it. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office sealed the end of the criminal accusations against him in March 2022, leaving little or no room for any accusation against him to prosper in court. An exhaustive years-long investigation that uncovered the transfer of millions by the monarch out of Spain, but without legal consequences for him, protected by immunity, prescription and, in some cases, lack of evidence.
The investigations led by the prosecutor Juan Ignacio Campos, now deceased, left black and white how Juan Carlos I amassed millions and millions of euros behind the back of the Spanish treasury when he was on the throne, and also how he moved them to avoid being discovered before and after to abdicate in 2014. Special attention deserved that in 2008 his collaborators opened an account in a Swiss bank to manage the funds of his Panamanian foundation Lucum, and specifically the 64.8 million euros coming from the then king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz.
These criminal investigations, which ended up being archived, are connected to the civil lawsuit that Larsen filed: it was she who ended up receiving those funds in a Bahamas account as an “irrevocable donation.” Money that, according to the businesswoman, the king tried to recover through threats and harassment.
All possible charges were buried by the inviolability that protected him until his abdication in 2014, as well as by the expiration and prescription of any accusation and, ultimately, the lack of evidence on some of them. Also his payments to the Treasury, made after knowing that he was being investigated. For example, the Prosecutor’s Office said that there was no evidence that those almost 65 million euros were related to the role that the king emeritus had in the awarding of the construction of the AVE to Mecca to a consortium of Spanish companies.
The archival decrees of the Prosecutor’s Office exposed a financial engineering until then hidden from the general public, but at the same time they built an impregnable wall. No complaint for these facts and with these data in hand, if it has been filed, has been successful against the king emeritus in the Supreme Court a year and a half after the triple shelving.
The existence of an investigation against him triggered the unprecedented decision to leave Spain and settle in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The filing of those proceedings marked the starting signal for a series of sporadic visits, especially to Galicia and his sailboat Bribón, and now the new judicial victory won in London leaves his path free of legal concerns. All of this while waiting to know what he means when he states that this latest decision “reestablishes the necessary conditions for future public appearances.”
#rejection #British #Justice #Corinna #Larsens #lawsuit #Juan #Carlos #paves #return