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The decision is added to the one adopted regarding the 65 million euros that the king emeritus of the Saudi monarchy received
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The decree that rules out filing a lawsuit is due to the lack of collaboration with the investigations of the Saudi authorities
Without the collaboration of Saudi Arabia it was only a matter of time and the Saudi authorities have not even responded to the request for judicial collaboration made by the Spanish Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. For this reason, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has proceeded to file the investigative proceedings that it kept open in relation to the contracts signed for the construction of the AVE to Mecca to determine if they could have been committed corruption offenses in international economic transactions and bribery by Spanish citizens and foreigners outside of Spain, tax sources informed EL PERIÓDICO.
The file decree, signed on this occasion by the Anticorruption prosecutor in charge of the case, Louis Shepherd, contains explanations similar to those that led to decreeing the same measure for the open investigations of the king emeritus, in which it was not possible to prove that the 65 million euros he received from the Saudi monarchy were the product of something other than a gift, despite that the contracts were high enough or “calculatedly ambiguous”, in the words of the public ministry itself, such as those signed to be able to conceal the payment of commissions.
Insufficient to see commissions
The decree by which the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office ruled out filing a complaint against Juan Carlos I stated that, despite the steps taken, “there are no elements or principles of evidence that reasonably support the payment of commissions whose ultimate destination has been to pay the authorities or public officials responsible for the award project”.
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But just before he also said this: “No one hides that these contracts, calculatedly ambiguous and remunerated for amounts significantly higher than the value of any legitimate service that the intermediary can provide, usually allow payment to be channeled to the authorities or officials involved in the awardin such a way that the intermediary keeps a part of the payment for himself and transfers to the local authority the gift agreed for having won the contract”.
He was referring, for example, to the one signed with Shahpari Azzamy Zanganehwhich Juan Carlos commissioned through a letter “to be able to carry out negotiations” with Prince Bin Abdul Aziz. The contract that she signed for her services with the companies was equivalent to 2% of the contract value of the project; then she changed to a fixed commission of €95,788,435, of which he received part. Prior to the contract signed with Zanganeh, who was one of the people investigated by Anti-Corruption in the proceedings now archived, the companies that make up the Spanish-Arab consortium had signed a similar one with Prince Abdulaziz Bin Mishal for other 120 million of euros.