Spain’s Supreme Court public prosecutor is opening an investigation into former Spanish king Juan Carlos I, regarding suspected commission payments for a contract for a high-speed AVE rail link to Mecca.
The prosecutor stated that the purpose of the investigation will be to ‘focus precisely on establishing or discarding the criminal relevance of deeds that happened after June 2014′, when Juan Carlos abdicated the throne and was no longer protected by ‘inviolability’.
The prosecutor’s investigation into the king has derived from another probe led by the country’s anti-corruption prosecutor over the second phase of a high-speed railway linking the cities of Medina and Mecca in Saudi Arabia – and which was granted to a group of Spanish companies, including the construction firm OHL, in 2011.
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In March, it was also reported that public prosecutors in Switzerland were investigating a $100m bank account that was held by Spain’s former king Juan Carlos I in Geneva, according to a report first published by Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève.
The money allegedly originated from a ‘donation’ made in 2007 by the Finance Ministry of Saudi Arabia, at the time that Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was the Saudi king. He died in 2015. The account, in the Swiss Mirabaud Bank, was reportedly in the name of the Lucum Foundation, a former Panamanian entity whose sole beneficiary was Juan Carlos I.
From this account, a ‘gift’ payment of 65m euros was later made in 2012 to Juan Carlos’s former mistress, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.
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