Where’s Juan gone? Spain gripped after ex-monarch flees

Speculation over the whereabouts of former monarch Juan Carlos gripped Spain a day after he announced he was leaving the country for an unspecified destination amid a growing financial scandal.

In a letter published on the royal family’s website on Monday, Juan Carlos told his son King Felipe VI he was moving outside Spain due to the “public repercussions of certain episodes of my past private life”.

Juan Carlos is the target of official investigations in Spain and Switzerland, which are looking into possible financial wrongdoing, and his bombshell announcement took most Spaniards by surprise.

Neither the royal family nor the government have disclosed where he was going. Daily newspaper ABC reported yesterday that Juan Carlos left Spain on Sunday and flew via Porto, in neighbouring Portugal, to the

Dominican Republic. La Vanguardia also said he was in the Caribbean country, but only temporarily.

But El Confidencial newspaper said he could be in Portugal, where he spent part of his childhood, or in France or Italy, where he has family and friends.

The 82-year-old former king is credited with helping Spain peacefully restore democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

But marred by scandals in the later years of his reign, Juan Carlos in 2014 abdicated in favour of his son Felipe, losing the immunity from prosecution Spain’s constitution grants to the head of state.

In the wake of Juan Carlos’s announcement, some people called for the monarchy to be abolished.

The leftist political party Unidas Podemos, the junior member of Spain’s coalition government, wants a public debate about creating a republic.

“There is no reason at all to keep supporting a monarchy which doesn’t possess minimum ethical standards,” the party said in a statement late on Monday.

But the Socialist party, which leads the government under prime minister Pedro Sanchez, has showed no willingness to follow that path and has declared its support for Felipe.

Even so, Mr Sanchez recently said he found the developments about Juan Carlos “disturbing”.

Spain’s general prosecutor’s office in June said it was investigating whether Juan Carlos received millions of dollars in kickbacks from Saudi Arabia during construction of a highspeed railway there by a Spanish consortium.

Since then, Spanish media outlets have published damaging evidence from a separate Swiss investigation into millions of euros allegedly given to Juan Carlos by Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah.