Spain’s former king, Juan Carlos, will return to the country on Thursday for his first visit since leaving nearly two years ago under a cloud of financial scandals.
The royal household said Juan Carlos would visit the north-western town of Sanxenxo, where a yachting event is scheduled to take place. On Monday the 84-year-old will travel to Madrid, where he is expected to meet his son, King Felipe VI, and other members of the royal family.
The visit, the household said, reflects the former king's desire to “travel frequently to Spain to visit family and friends”.
Juan Carlos left Spain in August 2020 as Spanish and Swiss prosecutors mounted investigations into his involvement in alleged financial wrongdoings. The scandals and his departure stirred debate over whether Spain should have a monarchy.
The Spanish prosecutors did not find evidence to take the former monarch to court because much of the financial misbehaviour, involving millions of euros in undeclared accounts, happened when Juan Carlos was protected by immunity as Spain’s king, and other possible fraud fell outside the statute of limitations.
The investigations allowed the recovery of €5.1 million ($5.4 million) in fines and taxes for income that Juan Carlos had failed to declare to Spain’s tax authorities, the prosecutors said in their conclusions.
Swiss prosecutors also dropped their investigation.
Although the former king was not among those directly investigated in the Swiss nquiry, prosecutors there said they found that Juan Carlos received in 2008 — before he stepped down as king — the sum of $100 million. The case also turned up millions more received by the king or his former lover Corinna Larsen, a Danish-German businesswoman.
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