Sister of King Felipe allegedly failed to declare taxes and will appear in court alongside her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin
Spain’s Princess Cristina has lost a legal battle to avoid being tried for tax fraud and is expected to testify next month in a corruption trial also featuring her husband and 16 other defendants.
Lawyers for the sister of King Felipe VI, a prosecutor and a state attorney representing Spanish tax authorities all said earlier this month that the charges against Cristina should be thrown out because government officials agreed she had committed no crimes and should face at most an administrative tax evasion fine.
But three judges presiding over the case disagreed. They sided with an investigative judge who spent four years looking into the case and who ruled earlier that she could be tried because of evidence presented by the private anti-corruption group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands).
Cristina, 50, who is sixth in line to the Spanish throne, will face two counts of tax fraud, carrying a maximum prison sentence of eight years, for allegedly failing to declare taxes on personal expenses paid by a property company she owned with her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, an Olympic handball medallist turned businessman.
After the decision was issued, the royal palace said it respected all Spanish judicial decisions but declined further comment. Cristina works for a Spanish bank in Switzerland where she lives with her family, and has been excluded from royal appearances for years because of the case.
Her lawyer, Miquel Roca, told reporters that the decision was disappointing but Cristina had received the news “with the utmost serenity and all due respect that any judgment always deserves”.
She will next appear in court on 9 February, when the defendants begin testifying, and she is expected to be the last person to answer questions in proceedings scheduled to end by 26 February.
During the trial, the judges will have to weigh up whether the couple criminally abused the property consulting firm Aizoon, described in court documents as a “front company”, to fund luxury vacations, throw parties at their modernist Barcelona mansion and pay for salsa dancing classes.
The trial is the first time that a member of Spain’s royal family has faced criminal charges since the monarchy was restored in 1975.
Urdangarin and others face charges of embezzling up to €6.2m (£4.7m) from contracts that were allegedly inflated or never honoured. The princess’s husband, formerly the Duke of Palma, is accused of using his title to land the deals for the Nóos Institute he ran with his business partner Diego Torres.
The case is being heard in Palma de Mallorca, the regional capital of Spain’s Balearic Islands, because many of Urdangarin’s business deals under investigation were for the islands.
Cristina denied knowledge of her husband’s business activities during a closed-doors court appearance in 2014. But the investigative judge decided she could be tried for tax fraud allegedly committed in 2007 and 2008.
Details about the couple’s regal lifestyle that emerged from the pre-trial investigation from 2011-14 outraged Spaniards as the country teetered on the edge of an economic crisis and the unemployment rate hit 27%.
The case was seen as one of the reasons for the abdication of King Juan Carlos in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe.
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