MADRID, Spain – The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has asked that former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero be charged with a crime of embezzlement of public funds over the obtaining of the jewels found in his office and valued at 1.3 million euros. The judge, after receiving the prosecutor’s filing, has agreed to request from the State Heritage Subdirectorate-General a copy of the list drawn up in 2012 recording all “institutional gifts made to the Presidency of the Government” between 2004 and 2011, a list on which the jewels found in the socialist former leader’s safe do not appear.
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The Public Prosecutor’s Office has turned Zapatero’s own version of how he obtained the jewels against him: if, as Zapatero maintains, they were a gift from Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud handed over at Moncloa in 2007, then the socialist leader would have committed a crime of embezzlement by appropriating them “with intent to profit” after leaving the Presidency of the Government. This is the thesis set out by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Rodríguez Zapatero’s defence filed a document on 23 September stating that the three most valuable pieces in his collection were a gift received during his presidency, a present given to him by the King of Saudi Arabia on the occasion of his official visit to Spain. Zapatero explained that he had himself written to the Saudi Royal Household asking it to corroborate his version, without success, and therefore requested that the judge send a letter rogatory seeking Saudi Arabia’s collaboration, a request the Prosecutor’s Office opposes.
“With such a brief justification, the defence intends that, without any further documentary data, the court, in a pure exercise of procedural automatism, issue a letter rogatory to Saudi Arabia and, in passing, accept its version of the origin of the jewels as good,” reads the harsh filing by prosecutor Elena Lorente.
The Prosecutor’s Office notes that the goods Zapatero received between 2004 and 2011 were donated by the Presidency of the Government to be incorporated into the Heritage of the General State Administration, with a record drawn up on 1 March 2012, and “in the list of goods handed over, indeed, the jewels found in Mr Zapatero’s office do not appear,” Anti-Corruption relates, attaching the record in question, obtained from open sources, with the judge having requested a copy of the document.
Anti-Corruption’s conclusion is that “Rodríguez Zapatero comes to acknowledge that, while prime minister, he accepted jewels of very significant value and that he did not hand them over to State Heritage, as he did with other gifts.” “If his version were true, it would follow that the origin of the jewels could imply the commission of a crime of embezzlement of public funds,” Lorente states.
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The prosecutor specifies that “it is true that the acceptance of gifts of scant intrinsic value has been admitted, though increasingly restrictively, by custom,” but in the case of the jewels their high economic value makes it impossible to frame their receipt within “the framework of social adequacy.” So, “always following the defence’s explanations,” Anti-Corruption considers that the former prime minister can be attributed “an alleged act of misappropriation of public assets that would fall within the crime of embezzlement, punishable by imprisonment and absolute disqualification.” When Zapatero received the jewels at the Moncloa Palace, they became “public assets,” which “Zapatero allegedly appropriated with intent to profit, at the end of his mandate and by excluding and concealing such jewels from the effects that he did declare and hand over to State Heritage on 1 March 2012.”
