Spanish former king Juan Carlos pays €4.4m in new tax irregularity admission  

Spain's scandal-hit former king Juan Carlos I, who now lives in exile

Credit: OSCAR DEL POZO /AFP

Former Spanish king Juan Carlos has made an extraordinary payment of close to 4.4 million euros in unpaid taxes to Spain’s authorities, the second time in three months that the ex-monarch has effectively admitted an irregular financial situation.

According to a statement issued by Juan Carlos’s lawyer, the payment is aimed at clearing tax owed on the cost of private flights enjoyed by the 83-year-old former king but paid for with funds from Swiss accounts officially belonging to his cousin, Álvaro d’Orleans-Borbón. 

The Telegraph last year revealed that Juan Carlos had taken flights on private jets worth €5m between 2016 and 2019 and paid for by the Zagatka Foundation, a Liechtenstein-registered fund of which Mr d’Orleans-Borbón is the principal beneficiary.

In total, Zagatka’s Swiss bank accounts have shelled out at least €8m on private jets used by Juan Carlos since 2009.

The origins of Zagatka’s funds as well as a $100 million “donation” Juan Carlos received from the king of Saudi Arabia in 2008 are being investigated by a Swiss prosecutor, who is probing members of Juan Carlos’s circle for alleged money laundering. 

In 2020 prosecutors from Spain’s Supreme Court opened three separate investigations into Juan Carlos’s financial affairs, including the Saudi payment into a Panamanian shell company called the Lucum Foundation, which was wound up in 2012 with the balance of 65 million euros being donated to Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, the former king’s ex-lover.

Prosecutors are also investigating the alleged existence of a Jersey trust fund linked to Juan Carlos, and the undeclared use of credit cards linked to a bank account in Mexico by the former king and other royal family members.

Juan Carlos, who has lived in exile in Abu Dhabi since last August, hopes to have settled the credit card investigation with a €678,000 tax payment in December.

Thursday’s announcement was Juan Carlos’s first public recognition that he has used funds from Zagatka or any other Swiss accounts linked to offshore structures.

Jose María Mollineda, secretary general of the Gestha tax inspector’s union, told The Telegraph that the payment of €4.4m in income tax plus surcharges suggested that around €8m of previously concealed funds had been declared by Juan Carlos.

“Now the tax agency has to investigate whether this payment is complete, and that he has not left anything pending in other accounts, be they in Jersey, Switzerland or Oman,” Mr Mollineda said.

Spain’s prosecutors will wait on the tax agency’s conclusions to see whether the new information on Zagatka impacts on any of the three existing lines of investigation, or warrants the opening of a fourth.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he "rejects" the former king’s “uncivic behaviour”, while offering his full support to his son, Felipe VI, whose reign was proving to be “exemplary”.

Read more: A wife, a lover and a hunting scandal. How Spain’s King Juan Carlos fell from his throne