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A UK-based charity which works with refugees and asylum seekers has decided to accept a £9m donation funded from a once-secret Jersey trust linked to Spain’s exiled former king.
The Refugee Council said it had spent the last six months investigating the origins of a €10m (£8.8m) bequest contained in the will of Joaquín Romero Maura, a trusted aide of disgraced king Juan Carlos I.
Announcing the acceptance of the funds, the London-based charity told i that it had found “no material evidence of fault or wrongdoing” related to the gift and believed accepting it is “in the best interests of… the refugees that we work with”.
The donation will come from The JRM 2004 Trust, which was set up in 2004 with Señor Maura as settlor and Bermuda Trust (Jersey) Limited as trustees.
The trust was a blend of two trusts named Tartessos and Hereu created in 1995 and 1997 respectively by Juan Carlos I’s former close aide, Manuel de Prado y Colón de Carvajal, who was later jailed for embezzlement and has since passed away.
It was previously speculated that the €10m Jersey trust at the centre of the investigation was believed to hold cash offered as a “sweetener” for Spain’s support for the coalition against Suddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
The money was the target of an investigation by prosecutors at Spain’s Supreme Court to determine whether the money originally belonged to Juan Carlos I.
A probe into the former Spanish King's alleged secret fortune in Jersey was launched in 2020 – triggered by an apparent attempt to transfer millions of euros from the offshore account, which was picked up by the country’s anti-money laundering authority.
However, it was officially dropped in 2022 when the investigating authority said that it had failed to find sufficient evidence of criminal activity.
Juan Carlos I was crowned king in 1975, but abdicated the throne in 2014 amid declining popularity.
He fled the country in 2020 amid investigations concerning financial irregularities, and later settled in the United Arab Emirates.
Pictured top: Juan Carlos I, who abdicated in June 2014.
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