The king emeritus's lawyers have defended this Tuesday, during a hearing held in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, that if his ex-lover Corinna Larsen implicates the CNI in the harassment that he claims to have suffered from Juan Carlos I, the fact that the secret services of the State intervened implies that they were "sovereign acts" that would be protected by immunity.
This has been expressed by one of Don Juan Carlos's lawyers in a long statement of about two and a half hours in which he has seized on the "specific accusations" recounted by Larsen in his lawsuit before the British courts that describe two specific passages: a visit that the then head of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán would have paid him in London and a search that CNI agents would have carried out in his home in Monaco.
The lawyer has reasoned that, if according to Larsen's version, the CNI harassed her in a "covert mission" orchestrated by Sanz Roldán supposedly by order of the then king, it would be a "classic" case of "sovereign acts" that are protected by immunity.
And this regardless of the fact that said acts could suppose an "abuse of power" by the state agents involved in them, the lawyer of the former head of state has underlined, citing abundant jurisprudence in this regard.
Larsen's legal representative, for his part, in an intervention of about 45 minutes that has been cut by a one-hour break, has stressed that the former monarch would only be protected by immunity in the event that said acts had been in the "official" interest, that is, of the Spanish State, although in this case it has argued that it would have been in a mere personal interest, for its own benefit.
The objective of this hearing is for the parties to present their arguments regarding the decision adopted on March 24 by Judge Matthew Nicklin not to recognize any immunity to the king emeritus.
On July 18, the British magistrates authorized the lawyers of Don Juan Carlos to appeal Nicklin's decision, but they already specified that only with respect to the events that took place between 2012 and 2014, when he was still head of state, since they understood that in the events that would have taken place after the abdication, the British judge was correct in not appreciating immunity.
The businesswoman sets the time frame of the alleged harassment between 2012 and 2020. According to the lawsuit, Juan Carlos I would have harassed her after she ended the relationship they had maintained. First to try to get her back and then as a revenge to harm her in her business.
The hearing coincides with the broadcast of a Corinna podcast, in which she reveals intimate details of her past relationship with Juan Carlos, whom she met in the world of hunting. According to accounts, the bond between them reached a point where Corinna felt as if she were not only his girlfriend but his wife, despite the fact that he, she claims, had many mistresses. The podcast is titled "Corinna and the King," produced by the Project Brazen content studio, co-founded by journalists Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, along with PRX.
