The King Emeritus of Spain is under fire for corruption cases.
The Spanish group OHL would have paid 4.6 million dollars to the now Spanish emeritus King, Juan Carlos I, for his alleged intervention in the sale of land in Playa del Carmen, back in the 1990s, according to the Spanish portal Ok Diario.
The transaction was carried out, allegedly, through Álvaro de Orleans, cousin and apparently the frontman of the King Emeritus. This, according to his testimony before the Swiss prosecutor Yves Bertossa in 2018.
“In the mid-1990s, I had knowledge of land for sale in Mexico, to be more exact in Playa del Carmen,” Orleans told the prosecutor.
“Those lands belonged to a Caribbean company, essentially Mexican, of which I do not remember the name. This company wanted to sell the lands and I thought that it was more interesting to exploit them,” he added, according to the document.
Orleans assured that, as a late payment for his help and for contributing “his vision of the project”, on May 25, 2009, he obtained a check for 4,689,930 US dollars from the Spanish company Huarte (at that time already part of the OHL group ).
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The payment would have been made to the account of the Zagatka foundation in Geneva, of which De Orleans appears as the main beneficiary.
However, according to the investigation by the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office, it is actually a bank account used by King Juan Carlos I.
OHL company denies the transaction
For its part, the construction group denied Ok Diario having made such payment.
“OHL has never paid Álvaro de Orleans any amount as intermediation in the purchase of land for a real estate project in Playa del Carmen, in Mexico,” they pointed out.
According to Ok Diario, the land could be that of the Ciudad Mayakoba development, where OHL invested hundreds of millions of euros.
However, the Spanish company Huarte reportedly acquired the land in the late 1970s, making it unclear which project De Orleans is referring to or why the commission arrived decades after the transaction.
Currently, King Juan Carlos I is under the spotlight for several corruption cases, although the Spanish Congress has refused to proceed against him.
Source: Ok Diario
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