“We are motivated by the defense of the general interest in that we believe that crimes against the Public Treasury are required that 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 and ethical obligations, especially enforceable to those “people who hold public positions of relevance to the constitution, in this case, the Head of State.”
With these words begins the complaint that a group of jurists and intellectuals present this Monday before the Supreme Court against King Juan Carlos I, who is accused of five crimes of tax fraud, and who also challenges the regularization before the Treasury carried out in 2021, which The prosecution accepted it and it served to close the investigation into the king emeritus.
Among the signatories of the document that the popular prosecution intends to exercise are former prosecutors Carlos Jiménez Villarejo and José María Mena, former Supreme Court justices José Antonio Martín Pallín and Clemente Auger, jurists such as Javier Pérez Royo, Blanca Rodríguez Ruiz, Joaquín Urías and Eduardo Ranz Alonso , intellectuals such as Josep Ramoneda and Pilar del Río and the journalist Miguel Mora.
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 they consider are not statute-barred, and at the same time tries to dismantle the criteria which led the Prosecutor’s Office to accept the regularization before the Treasury that Juan Carlos I made in 2021 when he already knew that he was being investigated for evading taxes.
The reported facts are related to the use of opaque instruments, among which are the Zagatka and Lucum foundations (with headquarters in Liechtenstein and Switzerland) to “hide or make difficult the amount of the amount defrauded.” The complainants allege that this conduct should be classified as aggravated tax fraud with a penalty of between two and six years in prison and that it does not prescribe until a decade later. So according to their accounts, none of the five reported years, not even 2014, whose deadline to declare ended on July 1, 2015, would be statute-barred.
The complaint recalls how in 2018, four years after his abdication, investigations were initiated into the assets of Juan Carlos I and that in 2020 the State Attorney General, Dolores Delgado, ordered an investigation initiated by Anti-Corruption to be sent to the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office. year before about alleged credit cards linked to funds of the Mexican businessman Allen Sanginés-Krause, by the king and other relatives, and an alleged collection of illegal commissions in the Ave to Mecca works 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 he had been notified by the prosecutor’s office on two occasions that he was being investigated. It was then, between December 2020 and February 2021, when the emeritus king deposited 4,416,717.46 euros to comply with the tax obligations that he had not covered in the declarations to the Treasury corresponding to the five-year period 2014-2018, when the monarch no longer enjoyed of inviolability after having bequeathed the Crown to his son Felipe VI. The complementary declarations include one to cover taxes derived 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 that Juan Carlos I enjoyed, including weapons. hunting for an amount greater than 100,000 euros.
It is these regularizations before the Treasury that are challenged 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 crimes against the Public Treasury. The complaint supports it with these words: “The regularization of the tax fraud occurs after having had formal knowledge of the existence of investigation proceedings by the Prosecutor’s Office that warned him of the existence of irregularities in the tax declarations, prior to its regularization. In any case, his legal representation had the opportunity to appear and learn about the content of the investigation proceedings, although he was undoubtedly aware of the irregularities that had been committed in the personal income tax returns corresponding to the years 2014 to 2018.”
For this reason, the complaint states, “the application of the principle of full and spontaneous regularization contemplated in the Penal Code does not apply” for the crime of tax fraud. In the opinion of the popular prosecution, the argument that the prosecution then used to consider that the regularization was done in a timely manner and that it was based on the fact that the two notifications did not detail in detail the facts that were charged, “is incongruous.” The legal representative of the king emeritus, the complaint states, “proceeded with the regularization with the data that had been provided to him by the prosecutor’s office and more specifically the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office.” “The Penal Code rules out the decriminalizing effects if it is regularized after having formal knowledge, not necessarily detailed, of the initiation of proceedings,” emphasize the complainants, who cite Supreme Court jurisprudence to support their thesis that this regularization was never due give it as good
Their conclusion therefore is that the Supreme Court must investigate the tax crimes and to do so they request the declaration of King Juan Carlos I as a defendant, and that his cousin, Álvaro de Orleans, who paid for private flights and weapons for the previous monarch, appear as witnesses. , the lawyer who has represented the emeritus in his tax investigation, Javier Sánchez-Junco, and some of the names who have managed the king’s finances in Switzerland such as Arturo Fasana and Dante Canónica. It is also requested to summon as a witness the Mexican businessman Allen Jesús Sanginés-Krause, who supposedly paid part of the expenses of the king emeritus and his family, as well as representatives of Swiss banks, companies and travel agencies.
The group of jurists and intellectuals who sign the complaint requests the Supreme Court to set a symbolic bond of one euro, since its purpose is to “enhance the superior 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 arrives, in the event of a conviction, the minimum possible prison sentence be set “taking into account the age of the defendant, but that the fine be “the maximum amount established by law.”
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