Five years can be many or few in a lifetime. For Iñaki Urdangarin (55), who this weekend is attending, in Geneva, the family reunion called for the graduation and coming of age of his daughter, Irene, that period of time has included his entry and exit from prison and the breakdown of his marriage to the infanta Cristina.
June 18 is not a date to celebrate, but it is the start of the countdown of the sentence that Iñaki Urdangarin began to serve, five years ago today, when he entered the Brieva prison (Ávila). Currently, he enjoys the probation regime; He is free, but not completely, since until next April the five years and ten months to which he was sentenced are completed, any minor crime would send him back to prison.
In a first sentence, handed down on February 17, 2017, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years and three months in prison for embezzlement, prevarication, fraud against the administration, two tax crimes and influence peddling in the Nóos case, but finally the sentence it was reduced to five years and ten months. On June 18, 2018, the husband of the Infanta Cristina entered the men's module of the Brieva women's prison, in which he was the only inmate.
One year and three months later, in September 2019, he was released from prison for the first time to volunteer three days a week at the Don Orione residence, a center located in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) dedicated to the care for disabled people, where he went traveling, on a round trip, the 100 kilometers that separate the prison from the center. The permit was cut short by the pandemic and Urdangarin did not leave prison or receive visitors between March and December 2022. Previously, the Infanta Cristina went to see him a few times, but the inmate did not request any intimate visit.
After the end of the confinement measures, Urdangarin requested a transfer to the Melchor Rodríguez García reintegration center in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), and expanded his volunteer work to go every day to the Don Orione residence. In the center of Alcalá, where he spent two months, he underwent a reinsertion program for economic crimes.
After being granted the third degree penitentiary or open regime, Penitentiary Institutions authorized his transfer to the Zaballa prison (Álava) after proving that he had a job offer in Vitoria, in addition to social roots, since they lived (and live) in that city. his mother and some of his brothers. On March 1, 2021, he left the center of Alcalá to enter the Álava prison, where he served a sentence in an open regime and slept from Monday to Thursday in the penitentiary center, while on the weekend he lived at the house of his mother, Claire Liebaert. In June 2021, he was granted the open regime and he no longer had to sleep in jail again.
From March 2021 to March 2022, when he was paroled, Urdangarin worked at the Imaz tax advisory firm.
Iñaki Urdangarin has recovered his relationship with his children, damaged more by the marital separation than by his time in jail, and he often travels to Barcelona to advise his son Pablo, who has followed in his handball footsteps. The family reunion this weekend in Geneva, without a single image with the Infanta Cristina, and even less with King Juan Carlos, certifies everything that has changed Iñaki's life, far away and in his time as the brand new Duke of Palm.
