Juan Carlos I pays more than four million to the Treasury for the private flights financed by a foundation of his cousin

The emeritus king has carried out a second fiscal regularization. If at the beginning of December paid 678,393.72 euros to avoid an investigation for a tax crime, has now made a second payment to the Treasury amounting to four million euros, as published by El País. That amount would correspond to tax debts derived from the eight million euros that Juan Carlos I received for flights made in a private jet company and that the Zagatka foundation, owned by his distant cousin Álvaro de Orleans, paid until 2018.

The Zagatka Foundation is a company that paid for part of the expenses of King Juan Carlos and was managed by Álvaro de Orleans. He paid eight million in flights to different countries in North America, the Caribbean and the Middle East between 2009 and 2018. The frequency of these trips allegedly increased after the abdication of the monarch in 2014.

The foundation was created in October 2003 in Liechtenstein. The Swiss Prosecutor's Office is investigating whether the emeritus used this relative to hide accounts in that country. Orleans denies being the monarch's front man and claims that he created the foundation to continue the family tradition of helping European monarchies. Until last June, when its regulations changed, the foundation had Juan Carlos I as the third beneficiary of its funds and Felipe VI and his two sisters as fourth and fifth, respectively.

One of the foundation's accounts, opened at Credit Suisse, would have accumulated around 14 million euros. With part of these funds dozens of flights in private companies would have been paid to Juan Carlos I and his ex-lover Corinna Larsen. According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, between 2016 and 2019 alone, five million euros from that account would have been used to pay for flights in the monarch's private jets. Among them, trips to the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi or the Dominican Republic.

Orleans himself acknowledges on the XRey podcast that he paid for those flights. "I think that money was well spent considering the extraordinary and, to a certain extent, dire circumstances in which it had to be spent," says the aristocrat, who claims to feel "very, very strong pain" over the situation of Queen Sofia. "The bank is the cousin. He is the one who pays for the planes," says Larsen in another conversation with Villarejo in reference to Orleans.

Zagatka drew on funds from Switzerland

Zagatka received 6.5 million euros in his accounts in Switzerland through five anonymous transfers to defray part of these expenses generated by the emeritus. As published The confidentialThis was an income of 5.5 million euros and another four of 250,000, made in 2008 to the account of the foundation in Credit Suisse.

The transfers only clarified that it was a "bonus" as a result of a "customer order." Despite this, the Swiss bank never investigated its origin. According to the information, the transfers occurred at a time when the Zagatka Foundation account was about to go into the red.

The largest occurred on December 11, 2008 and amounted to 5.5 million euros. Arturo Fasana, one of the king's money managers, who was investigated for money laundering in the Gürtel plot (although he was never tried), used that money days later to buy shares on the stock market.

Zagatka's payments were made to private flight rental companies such as the British Netjets UK Ltd or the Swiss Tag Aviation, which received in 2010 almost one million euros in some thirty transfers, although there was no record in the invoices of the routes you covered for your client. In 2011, another company, Vistajet Aviation Services, based in Malta, was chosen.

The payment of jets private companies were interrupted until November 2014, five months after the monarch's abdication. From that date, the contracting of services with Air Partner takes place. Of the about 8 million that allegedly left Zagatka to pay for private flights, more than 6.1 million went to this company that is listed on the London stock exchange.