Spanish former king Juan Carlos claims to have settled tax debt

Former Spanish King Juan Carlos has been in exile in Abu Dhabi since August

Credit: Francois Lenoir /Reuters

In the first-ever public acknowledgement that he has committed financial impropriety, Spain’s former king Juan Carlos has announced that he has paid 678,000 euros in taxes owed to the Spanish tax agency.

In a brief statement released on Wednesday evening, Juan Carlos’s lawyer, Javier Sánchez-Junco, said the former king had made an “unsolicited payment [of] €678,393.72 including interest and surcharges”.

The payment is an attempt to defuse one of three investigations launched by Spanish prosecutors into the disgraced former monarch’s financial activities. It was earlier revealed that Juan Carlos and other members of Spain’s royal family had spent hundreds of thousands of euros with credit cards linked to a bank account in Mexico.

Juan Carlos’s estranged wife, Queen Sofía, allegedly used her card to fund travel to London, while two of the couple’s grandchildren, Froilán and Victoria Federica, reportedly racked up bills shopping, travelling by Uber and on piano classes.

Allen Sanginés-Krause, a Mexican businessman with British nationality, has admitted paying more than 100,000 euros on travel expenses racked up by Juan Carlos in 2016 and 2017. The businessman has also admitted giving larger sums to an army colonel who worked for the Royal Household and has been questioned as to why he also gave money to the former king.

Juan Carlos's son King Felipe VI stripped his father of his pension in March

Credit: Pool/Getty Images Europe 

In spending this money on himself and on gifts for his family and not declaring it as income, Juan Carlos faced possible charges of tax fraud, although investigators may still wish to probe the precise origins of the funds.

The former king, who has been in exile in Abu Dhabi since leaving under a cloud in August, is also being investigated in connection with the alleged ownership of an undeclared multi-million-pound trust fund in Jersey, as well as his use of other structures linked to Swiss bank accounts.

The statement said Juan Carlos remains available for questioning by prosecutors at Spain’s Supreme Court, who have yet to summon the former king.

In March King Felipe stripped his father of his official pension and pledged to not accept any financial inheritance from the former king after The Telegraph had revealed that Juan Carlos had named his son as a hereditary beneficiary of an offshore fund based on a $100 million “gift” from late Saudi Arabian King Abdullah.