In conversation with a very good friend of mine who moves easily through the circles of power in Madrid, I commented yesterday: "At this rate, the king emeritus will have no choice but to go into exile; the political climate in Spain over the corruption of the royal family is now stifling". This was a result of the revelations that the signature of king Juan Carlos I is to be found on a secret document of the Panamanian company the Lucum Foundation, which served as a proxy for an account in Switzerland's Mirabaud bank in which the following deposit was made: "a donation of 64,884,405 euros made by the King of Saudi Arabia for credit of the King of Spain." To my surprise, my interlocutor not only did not agree with me but, without a moment's hesitation, refuted my suggestion: "On the contrary," he said. "From the way things are, the only place where he will be safe, judicially speaking, will be Spain".
What did he mean by that? Well, far from my naive idea that exile in some quiet corner of the Caribbean could be what the king emeritus needs to end his days, perhaps this dream paradise that has been talked about so much no longer exists, given all the extradition treaties that there are now. And on the other hand, in Madrid, he might need to be in reclusion, and could be bored and unhappy - as those close to him say - but, in terms of the progress of his case, judicially speaking, it is the place where he will be safest. My friend bases his reflection on the fact that we know little or nothing about the intentions of the public prosecutors that serve the Supreme Court and that the web that has been woven since before 2014 - the date of the monarch's abdication - and over the last few years will end up hindering many of the inquiries. By the way, this is what the Supreme Court prosecutors themselves are working on - in this case, the chief prosecutors in the area of economic crimes, not those of the criminal chamber - who so quickly accused, for example, the Jordis - Sànchez and Cuixart - of rebellion for climbing into the roof of a Civil Guard jeep and from there asking protesters to go home.
If the document that has come to light is shocking, much more serious is the silence of father and son and, by extension, of Spanish political power, whose main leaders have already made it very clear that this can of worms will not be opened under any circumstances if it might end up being decisive. The Spanish government's efforts to assert that the cases of corruption have no repercussions or impact on Felipe VI are an insult to people's intelligence and a degradation of Spanish democracy through practices that are, at the very least, far removed from the ethics required. The silence of the deputy prime minister and Podemos leader, Pablo Iglesias, is scarcely more encouraging.
There is one aspect of the document, drafted in 2011 and signed by Juan Carlos I, which is especially revealing about the limits of the partnership between father and son. This refers to the fact that, when the time comes and the emeritus king dies, Felipe VI will have to meet a series of conditions in order to be able to make use of the funds and these involve ensuring that the entire royal family remains well maintained, starting with his mother and also including his sisters and the children they have now or may have in the future. In the brief note that Felipe VI released when the first details of the scandal began to become known, he said that he would renounce this fund, something that as well as being impossible in his father's lifetime, ends up solving very little, since the money received through illegal commissions would remain in the family even if another of its members were in charge of managing it.
The tangle has already become too large. All that remains to be known is what the end will be like.