Insufficient Evidence That Spanish King Accepted $100 Million Saudi Bribe Says Swiss Prosecutor

For three years, Swiss prosecutors have been trying to find out whether a $100 million payment from the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to the former King of Spain was a bribe.

Yves Bertossa, Geneva's public prosecutor, even asked legal scholars to help him understand if the payment to Juan Carlos I counted as "misconduct in public office."

In the end, on Monday (13 December), three years after the investigation opened, the court found there was not a "sufficient" link between money sent by Saudi Arabia's former king and a bank account with links to Juan Carlos, the former Spanish king.

But why was a Swiss public prosecutor investigating a historic payment between a former king and a deceased one, neither of them from Switzerland? Embarrassingly for the Swiss, it was their banks that helped the flow of suspicious money.

In 2008, vast sums of money started arriving into a Swiss bank account owned by the Panamanian Lucum Foundation and held at Mirabaud, a historic Swiss private bank headquartered in Geneva. The funds totaled $100 million and they arrived from the Saudi Arabian Finance Ministry.

From this account, whose beneficial owner was Juan Carlos, €65 million ($73.3 million) was paid to a company owned by his former lover, Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Danish-German entrepreneur. The Mirabaud account was closed shortly after in 2012.

The payment was made via a Panama-registered account belonging to the Lucum Foundation. According to documents seen by Spanish newspaper El Pais, the account was held at the Bahamas subsidiary of another Swiss bank, Gonet & Cie.

In a recorded conversation between Sayn-Wittgenstein and former Spanish investigator José Villarejo, and leaked to the online newspaper El Español, Sayn-Wittgenstein mentioned the payment in connection with a Saudi railway deal.

This "deal" concerns the €6.7 billion ($7.5 billion) AVE high-speed rail link connecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It was won by a consortium led by the Spanish firm OHL in 2011 after Juan Carlos visited its late King and ministers on several occasions.

Bertossa said he opened the investigation in 2018 after reports that the former king received "illegal commissions" linked to the contracts. Since these commissions might have passed through banks based in his Swiss canton, the Geneva public prosecutor opened an investigation into suspicions of "aggravated money laundering" of five people connected to the deal. While Juan Carlos was not among those five under investigation, Sayn-Wittgenstein was.

The complexity of the banking transactions "showed a will to dissimulation," the prosecutors said. And using a foundation to take in the funds "demonstrated a desire to hide them."

However, “the investigation could nevertheless not establish sufficiently any link between the amount received from Saudi Arabia and the conclusion of contracts for the construction of the high-speed train,” and the probe was dropped.

Mirabaud was ordered to pay legal fees and a fine for not reporting money laundering, which totaled CHF 200,000 ($217,000). The bank said the fine was "tantamount to an outright acquittal, confirming that no money laundering offense has been committed by the bank.”

Gonet & Cie was not part of the probe, but the bank said it carries out all checks required by both regulations and the circumstances.

On Monday, Sayn-Wittgenstein said in a statement, "I have finally been cleared of wrongdoing of any kind. My innocence was evident at the outset and this episode has served to harm me further as part of the ongoing abuse campaign against me by certain Spanish interests.

“The principal wrongdoers, meanwhile, have not been investigated and have been given time to conceal their activities. They remain unaccountable.”

While the Swiss might have dropped the probe into the late King, his former kingdom has not. Spain's supreme court is still investigating the payment, as well as other charges of tax fraud.

Since his abdication in 2014, in favor of his son Felipe VI, Juan Carlos has been living largely in exile, which, since 2020, has been Abu Dhabi. There have been reports that the former king is "bored" of life in the Emirate, and would like to return home. But this is unlikely to happen until the former king is completely cleared of any money laundering.