Empty words. Waste paper. This seems to be the result of years of investigation by the Spanish public prosecutors to try to establish the crimes committed by Juan Carlos I and to open a criminal case against him. Apparently, in none of the three investigations that have been open against the emeritus has the prosecutor's office found any reason to press charges and bring him to justice. Of course they must be the only ones to think that he is innocent, but they are also the only ones who can press the button. In the time that has elapsed since the first information published by the Swiss press, there has been broad indolence across the judicial world at the prospect of pushing the case forward. As Pedro Sánchez said, in one of the phrases that he must most regret, the situation is the following: who do the public prosecutors depend on? Well, say no more.
Apparently, the prosecutors believe that there is no solid evidence to continue the investigation. Consequently, they considers that a statute of limitations affects the events examined, inviolability when he was head of state before abdicating in June 2014 and that, in addition, there were two tax back-payments to regularize his debt with the treasury. There is a small issue regarding the million-dollar regularizations that he made, which from his royal position must be insignificant, but is not so for ordinary mortals: when he forwarded the sums owing, he had already received notification of the opening of an investigation. But, as someone up above must have thought, why dwell on these trivial details? It was evident that the parties of Spain's Transition and, in particular, the PP and PSOE, were not going to allow this issue to be taken much further but, at least, they have been stripped naked before public opinion. They are the same, one on the right and the other on the left. However: could they at least save us the sermons on ethics, please.
Thus, a very weighty personal matter opens up: the former king is now able to return from his golden exile in the United Arab Emirates, as the parties of the regime have done what some thought, naively, that the Socialists would not lend themselves to do. It will be a return without honour, having dumped along the way tons of the credit that he once had, but that has never mattered much at all to the Bourbons throughout history. And a second, political matter: the PSOE, the PP, Vox and Ciudadanos have been shown up before public opinion after creating massive obstacles to prevent the investigation of anything. This has been seen in the Congress of Deputies, where it has not even been possible to debate whether there were reasons for setting up a parliamentary commission of inquiry. And thus the political work set in motion has been finished off by the always-opaque Spanish justice system.
The public prosecutors will be able to return calmly to their day-to-day routine - on Tuesday we learned that they are investigating the magician Lari for a joke he made on TV3 - and to the creation of new implausible stories about the Catalan pro-independence world. Whether about Russians or about anything else. With a hundredth of the imagination that the Supreme Court prosecutors showed in the referendum trial to sentence the Catalan leaders to more than a hundred years in prison, Juan Carlos I would have a very difficult time staying out from behind bars.
But be careful, despite their enormous effort, there is one aspect that the Spanish political-judicial framework doesn't control and that may end up dealing it a blow. In Switzerland, where this all started, the case about the former monarch's secret finances is still open.