Different sectors of the Government together with a number of other political groupsare demanding that King Felipe VI condemns the private activities of his father in his traditional Christmas Eve message this evening.
This would make a speech that is already proving complicated to be even more difficult, with the previous head of state currently surrounded by three different investigative judicial proceedings.
The words of some members of the government are trying to influence the discourse, in a very subtle way the socialists and more directly those of Podemos, began as soon as the possibility became known that the King ’emeritus’ could return to Spain for Christmas.
Don Juan Carlos left the country for the United Arab Emirates on August 3 in an attempt to ensure that the investigations around him did not harm the monarchy. The prospect of his return to Spain was put on the table at the beginning of December, when it was known that he had regularized a tax debt amounting to 678,393.72 euros corresponding to fiscal years after his abdication in 2014.
However, on the 17th, the ’emeritus’ King made it known that he was no longer considering the idea of spending Christmas in Spain, attributing it to the coronavirus pandemic in Spain and his status as an 83 year old person most at risk.
Prosecutors are still considering whether the regularisation of his taxes will rule out any prosecution for a tax crime, taking into account that it was done after the Public Ministry formally notified the defense of Don Juan Carlos that it was taking proceedings. What are now being investigated are possible crimes for the use of bank cards with opaque funds, coming from donations made by the Mexican businessman Allen Sanginés-Krause.
This line of investigation on expenses made with cash that had not been declared to the Treasury joins the other two already looking at the financial affairs of the king emeritus, the first for possible commission received from construction of the AVE to Mecca.
The year ends with Don Juan Carlos still as King Emeritus but far from Spain and, in recent days, various members of the Government, from the socialist ‘wing’, have said that they are convinced that the King’s Christmas message will be “appropriate to the circumstances”.
The pressure on the King to condemn his father’s activities turns his Christmas message into an examination
The first vice president, Carmen Calvo, said last Friday that King Felipe is “absolutely realistic” and “he knows very well what the public opinion of this country thinks in general terms and what the people demand in relation to the improvement and constant development of our democratic values,” also recalling that the King has already taken “very important decisions in the overhaul of the institution”.
