A weekend to the body of a king, transported, housed, and with a free place in a hunt can only be two things in the eyes of the Treasury: an unjustified increase in assets or a donation. And that is what will now have to be settled according to the lawyer Javier Sánchez-Junco respond to the information requirements on gifts that the Treasury makes to the taxpayer Juan Carlos of Bourbon.
As advanced The world, the inspection area of the Tax Agency wants to know who has paid for the hunts that the former head of state has attended once he abdicated. Who and how much, because the amount, the value of the gift, is no longer as valuable in the event of an increase in assets, but it is in the second case, that of the donation.
However, data is key in both scenarios. “If these hunts represented an unjustified increase in assets, and therefore the Treasury processes the case, we would be entering the field of tax crimeregardless of the amount of the undeclared, because the two regularizations presented by the king emeritus are void, being incomplete, “he explains to El Periódico Charles Cruzpresident of the Hacienda GESTHA technical union.
If the invitations you received were gifts from friends or flatterers, The matter must then be examined fiscally as a donation and through the Community of Madrid, which is the administration that deals with donations received by residents in its territory. Juan Carlos I was before he went to Abu Dhabi, at the time when, already king emeritus, he continued to enjoy his hunting hobby as a guest.
“It is not understood that the Prosecutor’s Office, it is assumed that with the approval of the Treasury, has archived its investigations if it turns out that the Treasury is still requesting information that can affect the validity of the regularizations presented”, reflects the prosecutor Cruzado, pointing out a new mystery difficult to understand in the entire process of Juan Carlos de Borbón’s agreement with the treasury, and that could also explain the limitation of his appearances in Spain.
For their part, sources from the Public Prosecutor’s Office have shown El Periódico a certain skepticism towards some statements that they see without any doubt the commission of a tax crime in the Treasury investigation regarding the hunts with which the emeritus was entertained, considering at least “highly debatable” that these activities, as well as the giftscan be considered “an increase in assets”, informs Angeles Vazquez.
If the king emeritus did not commit a tax crime, by proving that those invitations were gifts and not payments, he has before him a large outlay. In the case of donations from outside entities or non-family members, the Community of Madrid applies rates of between 18.7% and 34% for amounts of more than 100,000 euros. The Madrid treasury first calculates the value of the donation received at the time it was made, before reviewing whether exemptions or reductions in the tax base are applicable. King Juan Carlos abdicated in his son Philip on June 18, 2014.
millionaire patrons
In one of his regularizations, the advisors of the emeritus king already had to clarify in what capacity his cousin Alvaro of Orleans he paid for travel expenses from the Zagatka Foundation. Then the affected party declared it through income tax. The hunting vein of gifts to the monarch is similarly difficult to assess. If, already holding the head of state, all of his hunts were kept under a veil of discretion, as if it were a private matter -removed by the unfortunate episode in Botswana-, later, already without a crown, his hunting trips have been considered part of a private agenda, alien to the Royal House.
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However, in the world of hunting, some of the local patrons of King Juan Carlos are well known for their appearances on estates in Ciudad Real, which is the preferred province of the abdicated monarch for hunting. The financier and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Juan Abello and the businessman, deceased in 2020, Alfonso Cortina They were two of his main entertainers in La Mancha estates that he owned: El Lobillo in Abelló, and Pago de Vallegarcía in Cortina. Also the top executive Fernando Saiz Luca de Tenaowner of a well-known Bonelli farm, Pinos Largos, in Picón (Ciudad Real), in which the king coincided in 2000 with George Bushalready former president of the United States, and the North American general Norman Schwartzkopf. Also on the invitation list at the time is the British millionaire Hugh GrosvenorDuke of Westminster, owner of La Garganta, in Almodóvar del Campo.
Most of the occasions in which these tycoons invited the then head of state are not fiscally imputable. They will not have any tax treatment by the treasury the hunts in which the king emeritus was the hostin the state estate of Encomienda de Mudela, in Visco del Marqués, qualified at the time of his reign as the best red partridge reserve in Spain.