The Court of Auditors, the body in charge of audit political parties and public institutions, will now also analyze the budget of the King’s House. It is one of the measures that the Council of Ministers has approved this Tuesday to give more transparency to the Head of State, hours after Felipe VI communicated his assets (2.6 million euros). The Government and Zarzuela have coordinated their steps to promote the regeneration of the monarchy, an institution in crisis due to the scandals over the fortune of Juan Carlos I.
The Minister of the Presidency, Felix Bolanos, has been in charge of detailing those measures included in a royal decree, among which the supervision that the Court of Auditors will carry out stands out. According to Bolaños, this “external audit” will give a “true image of the heritage and financial situation of the Royal House.” La Zarzuela will also have to give advertising from now on all hiring to do and post on the web each quarter how the execution of the budget is going, the contracts signed with the House of the King, the remuneration and the institutional gifts.
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The global plan approved by the Council of Ministers has been drawn up after a dialogue of “months” between the Government and Zarzuela, Bolaños has specified. In fact, it was her predecessor in the Presidency, former Vice President Carmen Calvo, who began to address this issue with the head of the King’s House, Jaime Alfonsín, at the end of 2020, after Juan Carlos I decided in August to go to live in Abu Dhabi to try to mitigate the impact on his son of the information about his hidden fortune.
The Minister of the Presidency considers that this royal decree “consolidates into a legal norm and gives legal status to many practices that were already being carried out” in the Head of State, such as the code of conduct that Felipe VI imposed on the Zarzuela workers in 2014, the publication of the gifts received by members of the royal family or information about the assets of high officials. According to Bolaños, the government feels “satisfaction” because the “advance monarchy and be one of the royal houses in terms of the highest standards of compliance with exemplarity and integrity”.