From a juicy article published in Britain's Sunday Telegraph, we have received fresh news related to the corruption of the Spanish royal family, with the special element that, in this case, it directly involves the current monarchs, Felipe and Letizia. According to the UK newspaper, the Catalan businessman Josep Cusí, who is close to king emeritus Juan Carlos I and has been described on several occasions as one of his proxies, paid 50% of the honeymoon of the current king and queen. The trip in question, which lasted several months, spanned three continents and is now 16 years in the past, cost over half a million dollars and was paid for in equal parts by Cusí, through the company Navilot, and by the former king. Two initial questions: in the Spanish crown's rules on democratic exigence and transparency, where is the record of a gift of this amount to be found? And is it credible that the king emeritus would devote more than an entire year's annual allowance, according to what he receives from the Spanish government budget, to his son's honeymoon, if he had no other property?
In this lavish journey that we now know unfolded across Jordan, Cambodia, Fiji, California, Mexico and Samoa, among other countries, and in the organization of which Princess Corinna participated, the then-princes went under the false names of Mr and Mrs Smith as they paid for rooms in $7,000-a-night hotels. It is worth going to the newspaper archive and seeing the reports there that Felipe and Letizia went to Cuenca and Albarracín before journeying to Zaragoza on their honeymoon, and only an official trip to Jordan was noted. Nothing of a voyage across several continents.
A difficult expense to explain if it had been known in 2004 - two months earlier there had been the bloody 11th March train attacks in Madrid and the great commotion in Spanish society was still evident - but completely unjustifiable in 2020 - with the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis - and after all the vicissitudes of the Spanish monarchy, seasoned with million-dollar commissions from the monarchies of the Middle East, accounts in Switzerland investigated by that country's justice system, gifts to the king emeritus's lovers and a myriad of scandals that have led several parties to call for a parliamentary committee in the Congress of Deputies and which has been vetoed in Spain's lower house by a PSOE alliance with Vox and the PP.
It is clear that there will be no changes due to this new revelation, as the deep state has opted to close ranks even at the cost of further damaging the deteriorated image of Spain. Silence and disinformation are the house rules for official communication today. They are supported on this tortuous path by the established Spanish press, which will one day have to ask how it is possible that all the corruption revelations on the Spanish royal family and the two kings have their origin in the foreign news media, usually British or Swiss.
To hear the announcement that this week the monarchs will make a tour of Spain to see the impact of the economic crisis sounds, at the moment, like a search for false normality. The polls that have been published recently only accentuate the fall in the popularity of the monarchy in Spanish society, with two big vacuums of support: Catalonia and the Basque Country. And that won’t change, as the snowball has alleady grown to large dimensions and today’s societies aren’t about to cover up the truth.