The disgraced former King of Spain, Juan Carlos, has prompted an outcry in his country by announcing that he may return home next week after attending a private lunch with King Charles in London.
Reports that he will meet Charles have intensified speculation about whether he will attend next month’s coronation.
The news that Juan Carlos, 85, will return to Spain, where is expected to spend several days with friends, has revived concerns that he will irritate the Socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez as he did on his only previous visit since goinig into self-imposed exile.
In 2020 Juan Carlos was forced into exile in Abu Dhabi after investigations in Switzerland and Spain over alleged tax evasion and suspicious payments to his accounts in the tax havens of Geneva and Jersey.
Investigations into his financial affairs have since been shelved and the Spanish government has said that he is free to return to Spain whenever he wishes. However, the former king, who abdicated in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe, contends that the government has made it impossible for him to do so permanently.
Juan Carlos will attend a lunch with Charles on Tuesday April 18, according to Spanish press reports, citing sources close to him. He was invited to attend the coronation, along with King Felipe and Queen Letizia, but he has declined, instead organising the private lunch with Charles, according to La Vanguardia newspaper. However, other reports have said that it remains unclear whether or not he will attend the coronation.
After visiting London next week he will return to Spain where he will stay from Wednesday to Sunday. He is expected to meet yachting friends at the coastal town of Sanxenxo in the northwest Galicia region. He had intended to visit the town in late May but changed his plans owing to municipal and regional elections being held then.
El Pais reported that Juan Carlos intended to go to Sanxenxo to take part in training with the rest of the crew of the Bribon, his yacht, in which he competed at the 2019 world championships in Finland. He will stay with Pedro Campos, a close friend and president of the Sanxenxo Royal Nautical Club.
Juan Carlos hopes to participate in the world championship that will take place at the end of August on the Isle of Wight.
His fleeting return to Spain last year irked the government. In May he went sailing with friends at Sanxenxo. The visit was tarnished in the government’s view by Juan Carlos’s failure “to give explanations, to ask for forgiveness”. During his stay a journalist asked him to provide some explanations for his behaviour to which he replied: “For what?”
During that visit Juan Carlos also lunched with his son at the Zarzuela, the family palace in Madrid, where he is not allowed to stay for fear of embarrassing the government. The Zarzuela, along with other royal properties, were donated to the Spanish state but the royal family has the right of residence in them.
“The return of Juan Carlos for a second time will cause further embarrassment to the government,” said Ramón Pérez-Maura, the opinion editor of El Debate, a conservative online newspaper. “They haven’t been able to prosecute him and his return to Spain proves that he’s been treated very unfairly by the government. That’s very uncomfortable for Sánchez and his political allies.”
The precise roles that Sánchez’s government and Felipe played in forcing Juan Carlos to accept that he must go into exile have never been made absolutely clear. Their roles in preventing his return to Spain have also been opaque.
Relations between the king and his father, which had deteriorated, have now improved, according to sources close to Juan Carlos.
Queen Elizabeth’s funeral last year provided the image that the Spanish government reportedly tried to stop: Felipe sitting alongside his father. A spokesman for Podemos, the governing coalition’s junior partner, said: “Inviting an on-the-run criminal to a state funeral shows you just what the monarchy is in the UK and in Spain.”
Since then Juan Carlos has been photographed embracing his son at the funeral of King Constantine of Greece.
Juan Carlos’s fall from grace began when it emerged in 2012 that he had been on an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana with his mistress while Spain languished in an economic crisis.
He has been living in a mansion on an island off Abu Dhabi since August 2020. Months before Juan Carlos left, Felipe disinherited himself from his father and cut the former king’s €200,000-a-year stipend in an apparent attempt to distance the crown from the tax evasion and bribery allegations.
He still faces a trial in London over accusations of harassment made by his former mistress, Corinna Larsen, who uses the surname of a former husband, zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn.
Source: The Times
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