Spain’s attorney general has instructed supreme court prosecutors to investigate new corruption allegations against the country’s disgraced former king.
Juan Carlos, who abdicated in 2014, is already under investigation over his alleged role in a deal under which a Spanish consortium won a €6.7bn (£5.9bn) contract to build a high-speed rail line in Saudi Arabia.
Reports emerged in March suggesting Juan Carlos had received a $100m (€88m) payment from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah in 2008, three years before the contract was awarded. The king was covered by constitutional immunity while on the throne, but lost the protection when he stepped down to make way for his son, King Felipe.
The attorney general’s office did not give details of the new investigation, but said in a statement on Tuesday that a decree had been issued instructing anti-corruption and organised crime prosecutors to hand over their reports on the former king to supreme court prosecutors “so that they can continue the investigations until their conclusion”.
The announcement came hours after the online newspaper ElDiario.es broke news that anti-corruption prosecutors were investigating Juan Carlos, his wife Sofía and other members of the royal family over the use of credit cards linked to accounts not held in their names.
According to Eldiario.es, the transactions under investigation took place between 2016 and 2018, after Juan Carlos forfeited his immunity.
He abdicated after a string of damaging scandals that culminated in a controversial elephant-hunting trip to Botswana while Spain was devastated by the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.
But the scandals have refused to die down. Felipe stripped Juan Carlos of his annual stipend in March and renounced his personal inheritance from his father after reports that he was in line to receive millions of euros from a secret offshore fund with ties to Saudi Arabia.
The supreme court prosecutor said three months later that an investigation had been opened into “the second phase of the construction of a high-speed rail line to join the cities of Medina and Mecca” and was intended to “define or discard the criminal relevance of events that occurred after June 2014”, when Juan Carlos’simmunity ended.
Prosecutors in Switzerland are looking into a number of accounts the former monarch and his alleged associates held in the country.
It is alleged in documents from the Swiss prosecutor that Juan Carlos received a $100m “donation” from the king of Saudi Arabia that he put in an offshore account in 2008. He allegedly gifted €65m from the account to his former lover, Corinna Larsen, four years later.
Spain’s El Confidencial website reported in July that Juan Carlos had withdrawn €100,000 a month from the account between 2008 and 2012, and used the money to pay for some of the royal family’s expenses.
Juan Carlos has said that he never told his son he was set to benefit from two offshore funds, but has made no further comment on the allegations.
He announced in August that he was going into exile to protect his son from further embarrassment. In a letter sent to Felipe and released by the royal house, Juan Carlos said he would move from Spain because of the “public repercussions that certain past events in my private life are causing”.
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