A king for a king

At the time of writ­ing, the for­mer King of Spain Juan Car­los I is holed up in the United Arab Emi­rates. The rea­son why he chose to head for the desert is sim­ple enough: his lat­est and prob­a­bly last flame – a Dan­ish-Ger­man aris­to­crat called Corinna Larsen – was caught on tape con­fess­ing that Juan Car­los had re­ceived a back­han­der from a Saudi prince to the tune of 100 mil­lion dol­lars, for hav­ing fa­cil­i­tated the sale of a Span­ish-made high speed rail link be­tween Med­ina and Mecca. He squir­reled away this tidy sum in a Swiss bank under the name of Lucum, a Pana­man­ian shell com­pany of which he is the sole ben­e­fi­ciary (if he dies, the loot will pass au­to­mat­i­cally to the cur­rent king, Philip VI). Then Swiss and UK media re­vealed that in 2012 Juan Car­los had slipped two mil­lion dol­lars of these monies to his long-term Ma­jor­can lover, Marta Gayà; and no less than 65 mil­lion to Ms Larsen, who promptly put them into safe­keep­ing for him in a Ba­hamas ac­count. In 2010, it also turned out Juan Car­los had pock­eted a gift of 1.9 mil­lion dol­lars from the dic­ta­to­r­ial Sul­tan of Bahrain.

For a fort­night after this crowned grafter’s get­away, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment claimed not to have a clue as to his where­abouts, then said it only dis­cov­ered them when His Majesty him­self let them be known. Which is pass­ing strange, if it is borne in mind that from the minute he first went on the lam, Juan Car­los was under the pro­tec­tion of a full corps of gov­ern­ment-paid body­guards.

All this (the tax dodg­ing, the lovers, the ab­scond­ing) has been re­ported in the in­ter­na­tional press, but with one end­lessly re­peated caveat: that we should re­mem­ber it was this same lapsed Bour­bon who saved Span­ish democ­racy. As the Lon­don Guardian put it: ‘Juan Car­los played a piv­otal role in restor­ing democ­racy to Spain …not least when he stood firm in the face of an at­tempted mil­i­tary coup in 1981.’ Well, not ex­actly. The first cracks in this saintly image of Juan Car­los I ap­peared in 2001, in a Basque-pub­lished bi­og­ra­phy by a jour­nal­ist using the pseu­do­nym Patrícia Sverlo (to en­sure her per­sonal safety). Sverlo claimed that Juan Car­los – con­vinced that Spain had be­come in­sti­tu­tion­ally un­sta­ble, and con­cerned by per­ceived threats to its unity from Eu­skadi and Cat­alo­nia – de­cided to re­solve every­thing with a staged coup fol­lowed by a coali­tion gov­ern­ment headed by a mil­i­tary of­fi­cer (who would be the King’s for­mer aide, Al­fonso Ar­mada). This plan was not fully re­vealed to all the plot­ters, no­tably the coup’s front­man An­to­nio Tejero, who went off script and veered to the far right when he dis­cov­ered the coali­tion would in­clude So­cial­ist and Com­mu­nist MPs; some eight hours later, he was or­dered to stand down by Juan Car­los. This ver­sion of events was backed up by the pres­ti­gious Cata­lan his­to­rian Josep Fontana in an ar­ti­cle in El Temps mag­a­zine in 2004. In 2012, Der Spiegel pub­lished an ac­count by the Ger­man am­bas­sador to Madrid at the time, ex­press­ing his as­ton­ish­ment that Juan Car­los had told him ‘the coup is in de­fence of what most Spaniards want’. In 2018, Tejero him­self wrote to the on­line mag­a­zine El Plural say­ing, among other things: ‘I have never de­nied my role in the [Feb­ru­ary 23, 1981] events, when I was under the or­ders of the King’.

A re­cent in­ter­view on the Vi­laweb news site re­vealed that ‘Patrícia Sverlo’ is a Gali­cian jour­nal­ist called Re­beca Quintáns who has spent much of her pro­fes­sional life in­ves­ti­gat­ing the Span­ish royal fam­ily, which she be­lieves will soon have to throw in the towel. It’s im­pos­si­ble to tell if they’ll have done that by the time you read this; but at least we know that the erst­while head of Spain’s armed forces is being hosted by a coun­try in which flog­ging and ston­ing are legal pun­ish­ments and which treats thou­sands of its mi­grant work­ers as slave labour. No wor­ries there for Juan Car­los: a mi­grant he may be, but a worker he most def­i­nitely is not.