Spanish royal news
Spain’s king blocks scandal-hit son-in-law from royal duties
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
This article titled “Spain’s king blocks scandal-hit son-in-law from royal duties” was written by Giles Tremlett in Madrid, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 12th December 2011 23.46 UTCIn an unprecedented move to clean up an increasingly tarnished reputation, Spain’s royal family has blocked the king’s scandal-hit son-in-law from representing the crown and pledged to open its accounts for public scrutiny.
Iñaki Urdangarin, who became Duke of Palma after marrying Princess Cristina in 1997, has agreed with King Juan Carlos to step aside from royal duties while a police investigation into alleged fraud and misuse of public funds continues, the head of the Spanish monarch’s household, Rafael Spottorno, said.
“His behaviour has not been exemplary,” Spottorno told journalists who were summoned to the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid.
Headlines in the newspapers suggested that Urdangarin, a former handball player turned businessman, may have been a lot worse than “not exemplary”. El País, for example, accused him of taking up to €300,000 (£253,000) from the regional government of the Balearic Islands to set up a “fictional” office to promote the activities of a cycling team sponsored by the region’s government.
It was just one of dozens of leaks from an investigation into suspected misuse of millions of euros of public funds that were allegedly channelled into private companies through a non-profit foundation presided over by Urdangarin.
A full-page opinion piece in El Mundo, meanwhile, called on the courts to treat Urdangarin – whose royal status allows him to give evidence by writing instead of in person – in exactly the same fashion as any other Spaniard.
“The story is always the same,” wrote the lawyer Elisa de la Nuez. “Public bodies hand over large sums of money with virtually no control to the foundation presided over by Mr Urdangarin on the basis of his person and family connections motived by the fact that to do business in Spain it is important who you know rather than what you know.”
Urdangarin, who is not yet officially under investigation and has not been charged, broke several weeks of silence about the case on Sunday.
“Given the number of articles and comment pieces appearing in the media about my professional life, I wish to make clear that I deeply regret the serious harm being done to my family and the royal family, which have nothing whatsoever to do with my private activities,” he said from his home in Washington.
He has previously declared his innocence and said he is sure he will clear his name.
Newspapers have, however, reported that prosecutors are convinced the investigating magistrate in charge of a corruption and fraud inquiry involving the regional governments of the Balearic Islands and Valencia will soon officially name him as a suspect in the case. Charges, if presented, would be decided at a later date.
His lawyer, Mario Pascual, said that the king’s son-in-law was “worried, upset, indignant … and fully convinced of his innocence”.
Spottorno said the royal palace would provide a breakdown of the way it spends the more than €8m it receives from Spanish taxpayers every year.
This would appear on the royal family’s website within weeks. He did not, however, reveal how much detail would be given.
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Spanish royal family hit by fraud scandal
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
The once squeaky-clean Spanish royal family has become immersed in a growing fraud scandal that reveals how members of King Juan Carlos’s family may have cashed in on the monarchy’s good name.
At the centre of the scandal is the king’s son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin, a former Olympic-medal-winning handball player who became the Duke of Palma after marrying Juan Carlos’s sporty daughter, the infanta Cristina.
Urdangarin and his business partners are the subject of daily leaks from a fraud investigation involving millions of euros of public money as Spain’s royal family struggles to hold on to its popularity.
Police have raided the offices of his private companies and of a foundation he once presided over, taking away documents.
El País newspaper reported this week that prosecutors believe Urdangarin, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, will be named as a formal suspect in the case within two months. That could be a first step towards formal charges being placed.
The royal palace, meanwhile, added fuel to the scandal this week by suggesting Juan Carlos planned to cut the official royal family down to a nuclear core – in effect casting off his son-in-law and daughter.
On Thursday morning the palace press office appeared to have received a royal ticking off and publicly backtracked, saying “it deeply regretted having contributed to the fact that some media outlets reported this erroneously”.
Urdangarin himself, who now works for Spain’s Telefonica phone company in Washington DC, has said he is innocent.
“When I know the details of the investigations being carried out … I will be able to comment on their contents,” he said last month. “My professional behaviour has always been correct.”
Queen Sofia, meanwhile, has showed public support for her beleaguered daughter and son-in-law, allowing the latest edition of Hola magazine to publish pictures of her visiting them at their home in the US.
Speculation in Spanish newspapers has included predictions that Urdangarin will drop his aristocratic title so he can continue as a businessman or that Cristina will renounce her position as seventh in the line to the throne.
Within a few years of abandoning his sports career in 2000, and after studying at a prestigious business school, Urdangarin became the owner of a €6m (£5m) house in Barcelona. He set up various companies and became president of a nonprofit foundation, the Nóos Institute.
The institute boasted that its patrons included Urdangarin, his wife, an accountant described as an “assessor to the royal household” and professors from two of the world’s top business schools, the Barcelona-based Iese and Esade schools.
Nóos landed multimillion-euro contracts to organise events for regional governments in the Balearic Islands and Valencia.
But public prosecutors in Palma, the capital of the Balearics, have said there is evidence the institute was a front, charging hugely inflated fees and siphoning money off to Urdangarin’s private companies.
A €1.2m contract with the Balearic Islands was, prosecutors told investigating magistrate José Castro, “totally disproportionate to the task … based exclusively on a fictitious budget which did not analyse a single cost”.
They said evidence pointed to the foundation being used exclusively to channel money to other companies – many in the names of Urdangarin or his business partners.
“That was the sole aim,” they said.
At least €3.2m out of €5m was passed on from Nóos to Urdangarin’s companies, according to Publico newspaper.
The scandal comes as the royal family loses support among ordinary Spaniards. A regular poll by the state-run Centre for Sociological Investigation shows that, for the first time since polling started 17 years ago, trust in the royals has fallen below the halfway mark. Spaniards now place greater trust in the press.
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Spain’s king and queen bid farewell to Pope
Spain’s King Juan Carlos (at right in first photo below) and Queen Sofia said goodbye to Pope Benedict XVI at the Madrid-Barajas International Airport on August 21. The Pope visited Spain to attend World Youth Day festivities.
Duchess gives away fortune to marry civil servant
Note: This article is from the Guardian.
She is one of the richest women in Spain, owns a dozen castles whose walls are hung with works by Goya, Velázquez and Titian and is a distant relative of King James II, Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales. Now, however, the 18th Duchess of Alba is giving away her immense personal fortune in order to be free to marry a minor civil servant.
According to Guinness World Records, Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva, born in Madrid’s Palacio de Lira, has more titles than any noble on earth, being a duchess seven times over, a countess 22 times and a marquesa 24. As head of the 539-year-old House of Alba, her privileges include not having to kneel before the pope and the right to ride on horseback into Seville cathedral.
But the children of the duchess, 85, have until now blocked her plans to marry Alfonso Díez, 24 years her junior. The duchess and Díez, a civil servant in the department of social security who also runs a PR business, have been close friends for a number of years.
Her six children who, as she likes to point out, are all divorced, were all borne from her first marriage to Pedro Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artazcoz, son of the Duke of Sotomayor, who died in 1972.
The duchess, who is rumoured to have undergone extensive cosmetic surgery, shocked the nation when in 1978 she remarried, this time to the former Jesuit priest and intellectual, Jesús Aguirre y Ortiz de Zárate. Aguirre, who died in 2001, was illegitimate, something scandalous even in 1970s Spain.
In 2008 it appeared that the proposed marriage to Díez had been called off when the House of Alba issued a statement saying that the relationship “was based on a long friendship and there are no plans to marry”. The statement came after an alleged telephone call from King Juan Carlos discouraging the duchess from marrying Díez.
But whatever the king thinks it now appears the duchess is going ahead with the marriage, and the details have now emerged of how she plans to overcome her children’s opposition: by giving them their inheritance in advance, even though Díez has signed a document renouncing any claim to her wealth. “Alfonso doesn’t want anything. All he wants is me,” she said earlier this year.
According to a report published in Spanish newspaper El País, her eldest son Carlos inherits the Liria Palace in Madrid and the Monterrey Palace in Salamanca, as well as overall control of the family fortune. Much of the patrimony is managed by a foundation and, in return for tax breaks, belongs by law to the nation and cannot be sold.
However, the duchess’s personal wealth is estimated at between €600m and €3.5bn and she has been able to give her children and eight grandchildren a palace each, as well as a chunk of the thousands of acres of Spain that she owns. Her only daughter, Eugenia, inherits an estate in Ibiza and a further 600 acres near Seville.
The duchess insists she is not that wealthy. “I have a lot of artworks, but I can’t eat them, can I?” she has protested. The art that she cannot eat includes, aside from hundreds of paintings, a first edition of Don Quixote, Columbus’ first map of America and the last will and testament of Fernando the Catholic, father of Catherine of Aragon.
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