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Spain: Money laundering case involving Juan Carlos is on file

The chief prosecutor of Geneva said today that he had closed the criminal investigation for rinsing “Illegal supplies” allegedly received by the former king of Spain Juan Carlos from payments from Saudi Arabia due to insufficient data.

A private Swiss bank who was involved in the investigation, which lasted three years, was sentenced to pay a fine for failure to report.

The prosecutor Yves Bertosa reported that it found that Saudi Arabia had deposited $ 100 million in August 2008 in an account opened a month earlier in the private Mirabaud Bank in the name of a Panamanian institution whose real beneficiary was Juan Carlos.

But Bertosa said in a statement that could not prove that there was a link to a contract given three years later to Spanish companies for a high-speed rail link in Saudi Arabia, as broadcast by APE BPE.

Bertosa said he started the criminal investigation in 2018 following reports that the former king, who resigned in 2014, may have received “illegal commissions” linked to the contracts and registered in Swiss accounts.

What the research showed

“The investigation proved that Juan Carlos I received, actually, $ 100 million “to the account of the Lucum Foundation at the Mirabaud Bank in Geneva, by the Saudi Ministry of Finance on August 8, 2008,” Bertosa said.

The use of an institution and off-site accounts by various protagonists in the case showed a “mood of concealment“But he could not adequately substantiate the relationship between the Saudi payments and the contract for the railway connection between Medina and Mecca,” he added.

Additional payments of almost $ 19 million from Kuwait and Bahrain were deposited in the accounts of Juan Carlos and his German-born ex-girlfriend. Corina Chu Zain-Wittgensteinsaid Bertosa. She received the remaining 65 million euros ($ 73.3 million) from her Mirabaud account, which closed in June 2012 and the money was transferred to her account in the Bahamas, the prosecutor said.

The charges, according to court documents, against an asset manager, a lawyer, a banker, as well as Chu Zain-Wittgenstein and Mirabaud Bank, for alleged “distinguished money laundering”, were rejectedsaid Bertosa.

Juan Carlos not was among those against whom charges had been brought.

It was imposed on Mirabaud Bank a fine of 50,000 Swiss francs because he failed to report an account with unusual activity, the prosecutor said in his statement.

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