MALLORCA TODAY - Urdangarin denies royal household influence

Iñaki Urdangarin, the Duke of Palma, spent four hours today making a further declaration in front of Judge José Castro who is investigating charges of diversion of public funds by Urdangarin. The duke denied that the royal household had ever advised him on or endorsed his activities with the Instituto Nóos. He also denied that Princess Cristina had any involvement with Nóos and that she didn't have powers to take any decisions. The judge has requested sight of the visitors' book at the Zarzuela royal palace where, it has been alleged, Urdangarin met with Francesc Camps and Rita Barberá to discuss contracts for the Valencia Summit sporting debate in 2004, for which Nóos was handsomely remunerated. Urdangarin denies that there was such a meeting. The judge also asked about accounts in Switzerland; Urdangarin assured him they were not his.

The Urdangarin Case

This coming Saturday, the streets around the courts in Palma will, as they were this time last year, once more be thronged with members of the world's media. The son-in-law of King Juan Carlos, Iñaki Urdangarin, aka (and still for the time being) the Duke of Palma, will be the star turn. He has been required, for a second time, to declare in front of the investigating judge, José Castro, on matters related to alleged diversion of public funds that were, again allegedly, channelled to offshore tax havens via an organisation that the Duke had established, the Instituto Nóos.

Majorca has not been without its fair share of court-appearance spectaculars in recent years. Mostly, these have involved politicians facing corruption and fraud allegations. The Urdangarin case is quite different, as the cast list of those either directly or indirectly implicated makes it different. In addition to Urdangarin, this cast includes his former business partner, Diego Torres, Urdangarin's wife, Princess Cristina, and even the King himself. This is not, therefore, any old corruption investigation, it is one that threatens to go to the very heart of arguably the most important institution in Spain, one that holds a potentially increasingly volatile nation together, the monarchy.

The Urdangarin case arose from a corruption investigation into a politician, the former president of the Balearics, Jaume Matas. Though it first drew Judge Castro's attention in June 2010, public awareness of the case only truly emerged in November 2011 and focused initially on invoices raised by the Instituto Nóos that were sent to the Fundación Illesport, a body linked to the tourism ministry in the Balearics. Nóos was an organisation that Urdangarin and Torres had created with the principal aim of it being a vehicle for advising on and organising sports-related events. The invoices referred to the staging of forums and were raised between 2005 and 2007. They amounted to 2.3 million euros.

What alerted prosecutors and Judge Castro were the amounts and the fact that there had apparently been no open tender for the work. They also related to the period when Matas was president; the final invoice was raised just before the elections in 2007 that Matas lost.

Since these invoices became public knowledge, the case has moved on significantly. Other events that Nóos was involved with have been brought into the investigation, such as the Valencia Summit in 2004, an annual sporting debate. For organising this, Nóos was originally anticipating receiving three million euros. There has also been the revelation that the King ordered Urdangarin to give up his position with Nóos in 2006, but another organisation, the Fundación Deporte, Cultura e Integración, was subsequently formed by Urdangarin and Torres. This foundation, so prosecutors have alleged, was another means of siphoning funds to tax havens such as Belize.

When Urdangarin declared last February, he maintained that his former partner, Diego Torres, had robbed him. He also stated that his wife, Princess Cristina, had nothing do with either Nóos or a real-estate company, Aizoon. She was a director but was not engaged in its running as such. Aizoon has also been investigated for possible diversion of funds.

At the end of Urdangarin's declaration last year, the prosecutors ruled out indicting the Princess, believing that she knew nothing of her husband's affairs. The prosecutors are still saying there are not grounds for her to be indicted, but the possibility remains that she might be. If so, the affair would move ever closer to the King.

Prior to the latest declaration by Urdangarin and also that of Diego Torres, which is currently being heard, Judge Castro made what might seem an extraordinary statement. Referring to the 500 pages of evidence that have been amassed, the judge said that Nóos had been an organised plot of premeditated criminality. Against this background and of the various revelations that have emerged since last February, Urdangarin is now due back in court.

Urdangarin's re-appearance before Judge Castro was never going to be easy, but it has become even harder as a consequence of what Torres has been saying and revealing in court. As part of his defence, he has released hundreds of emails which suggest that the royal household was more aware of his and Urdangarin's activities than had been previously understood.

The royal family's personal attorney, José Manuel Romero, is one of those implicated in these emails. He has denied involvement in or offering legal advice to the Fundación Deporte, Cultura e Integración, the foundation that succeeded Nóos. Another attorney, that of both Princess Cristina and Princess Elena, has already been indicted over work that was allegedly undertaken for Nóos.

Other information that has emerged from the Torres emails is the fact that the King knew of an association between Urdangarin and Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German socialite and businesswoman and personal friend of the King's. Urdangarin, according to the emails, was to become associated with another foundation with sporting interests, Laureus, and Corinna had assisted in his gaining a position with a remuneration of 250,000 euros. More than this, the Torres emails point to the fact that Corinna was involved in the Valencia Summit in 2004.

Torres has repeatedly said that he has not been able to understand why his wife, Ana Maria Tejeiro, has been implicated in the Nóos affair and Princess Cristina has not been. His strategy of releasing email information to Judge Castro is designed, at least in part, to show that the Princess was more knowledgeable of her husband's affairs than Urdangarin has suggested and that the royal household was aware of this. He has also alleged that he has been offered money in order that he should remain silent. But Torres is not going to be silent. There is more to come, and it could be even more damaging for the Princess and for the royal family. And for Urdangarin. His court appearance is only a few days away, but what more might be revealed in the meantime?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Nóos was a premeditated criminal act

The investigating judge in the case of Iñaki Urdangarin and the Instituto Nóos has made a statement in which he makes clear that he believes the activities of the institute were premeditated with the intent to access public funds. Judge Castro, in an "auto" (essentially the case for the prosecution) of over 500 pages, describes Nóos as an organised plot of willful criminal activity. The judge has imposed a civil bail amounting to over eight million euros on Urdangarin and his ex-business partner Diego Torres, meaning that he is seeking assets from the two amounting to the bail rather than this being a bail that must be paid to avoid entering custody.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Urdangarin will testify again in February

Palma can prepare for another day of high media interest when, on 23 February, a year after his first appearance in court, Iñaki Urdangarin (the Duke of Palma) will be asked to declare in front of Judge Castro. The specifics of this appearance relate to alleged fraud committed by the King's son-in-law's Instituto Nóos between 2007 and 2008. Urdangarin's former business partner, Diego Torres, will testify the week before.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Ballester drops Duke and Matas right in it

José Luis "Pepote" Ballester, a former Olympic sailing gold medallist and ex-director general of sport in the Balearics testified yesterday in that part of the "caso Palma Arena" considering allegations related to the Duke of Palma. Ballester confirmed in open court what he had already declared to the judge that the Duke and former president of the Balearics, Jaume Matas, "plotted" contracts for the Duke's marketing organisation, Instituto Nóos, and that 400,000 euros were paid for a report that was cobbled together from others. Ballester also rejected any involvement by the Duke's wife, Princess Cristina.

Tightening The Nóos

All this talk of all-inclusives and a lack of winter tourism and flights ruining the paradise island, blah, blah, and one quite loses sight of what really put the "mal" into Mallorca with two l's. Corruption, and lots of it.

We have been sidetracked these past few months into neglecting the fact that cases surrounding the one-time Balearics president, Jaume Matas, are still going on. Lord alone knows how much this is all costing, but presumably there are special provisions, given deficit requirements, to allow for the payment of an army of investigators.

The current president, José Bauzá, is probably, on balance, quite content for the cases to still be being played out and periodically splashed all over the Spanish press. It might be a tad embarrassing that Matas was his predecessor as a PP president, but Bauzá made a virtue of excluding any candidate implicated in corruption from the spring elections. In the process, he might have hoped to undo all the scandal that has made Mallorca an object of such enormous amusement, but he can't do much about the elephant in the room - Matas, the gift that keeps on giving.

When you had pretty much forgotten that investigations were still ongoing, out of the blue come revelations of the type that had helped grant Mallorca its deserved status as one of the great centres of comic corruption.

The latest ones involve a minor royal, the Duke of Palma. The royal household has felt compelled to issue a statement that it has no comment to make on allegations being made about him other than to say that it respects the work of the judges. Minor royal he may be, but there is the slight matter of who he is married to - the infanta Cristina.

To cut to the chase, the Duke was at one point the president of something called the Instituto Nóos, an institute for sponsorship and patronage. What the investigators would like to know is why the Matas government, mainly through a body known as Illesport, paid the institute 2.3 million euros between 2005 and 2007. There are questions relating to four invoices totalling 1.2 million euros in respect of the staging of a 2005 forum and to invoices for nearly 450,000 euros that were raised a month before the 2007 elections, which Matas lost.

There was a common theme to these invoices, as the forum and the later 450,000 had to do with a so-called observatory of tourism and sport. At the forum this concept was discussed, whatever it actually meant, but nothing more was heard of it. However, the invoices of April 2007 mention it specifically.

No one seems to quite know what this observatory did, if anything. With the money the invoices generated, the institute made payments of its own, among which were those to companies belonging to one Diego Torres, an "expert in marketing", who succeeded the Duke as institute president in 2006, and also to a real-estate company run by the Duke.

Of course, there may be a very good explanation for all of this, while the revelations are all the more thrilling for the press as they involve royalty. But what they do, once more, is to highlight the tangled web of government agencies and foundations, especially within the area of tourism, and of other organisations, such as the Duke's institute, which were associated with them. Of these agencies, mostly all are now defunct, having been scrapped by the last government when the full weight of corruption charges hit the tourism ministry.

Why were there so many, though? And why was there ever any need for an "observatory" of tourism and sport? It may be unclear what its purpose actually was, but it sounds not dissimilar to the government's own so-called tourism strategy and research agency, Inestur, one of the agencies that now no longer exists. The Illesport agency was in fact a foundation for the support and promotion of sport in the Balearics. It might be argued that it was appropriate for it to engage the services of a specialist operation, i.e. the Instituto Nóos, but then what did it actually do, other than give money out?

The point is that, even if corruption comes to be proven, the real problem was all the various bodies that were set up with seemingly little or no control or idea as to why they were being set up. Tourism, and its associated sport sector, may have had its governmental budget cut, but it is still, as it was under Matas, a goose that lays the golden egg, or should that be the noose that lassooed a golden egg? Only to end up hanging itself. Allegedly.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.