Unidas Podemos has presented a formal petition to remove from the different instances and common areas of the Congress of Deputies “all artistic or photographic representation” that exists of Juan Carlos I for being, in the words of Pablo Echenique, a “criminal” who “has stolen money” to the Treasury.
The purple parliamentary group has submitted this request to the Congress Table (the Chamber’s governing body) to study the situation and has detailed that at least eight works of the emeritus king have been identified, including paintings, photographs and busts, although it specifies that “might be missing” some more that is located in that catalog.
In its letter, Unidas Podemos justifies that the visibility of artistic representations in honor of a “confessed criminal” supposes “an unacceptable humiliation that must be remedied.” Well, he stresses, Congress “is the seat of popular sovereignty and, therefore, the institution with the greatest dignity and democratic rank.”
Thus, Unidas Podemos emphasizes that there can be no artistic representations in Congress of “a character fallen from grace, guilty of serious economic crimes and on the run in an Arab theocratic dictatorship.”
Despite the fact that the king emeritus has not been convicted of tax fraud or any other crime, the United Podemos petition ensures that it has not been due to “absence of evidence” but “to the concurrence of the prescription of certain tax crimes together with the impunity derived from article 56.3 of the Spanish Constitution”. In this sense, he affirms that it is “public and notorious” that Juan Carlos I “carried out opaque businesses for decades and hid tens of millions of euros from the Spanish tax authorities in tax havens and in secret accounts”, which later regularized his situation “in the moment in which it was discovered” and that it only did so for the minimum part that had not prescribed and that was not protected by royal inviolability”
The purple ones doubt that that regularization was even “clean”. In any case, they affirm that this implied the “acknowledgment” that he had committed “tax fraud.” Thus, the conclusion of the facts is that Juan Carlos I is “a confessed tax evader”, that is, “a criminal”.
At a press conference, Echenique has also highlighted these arguments. “He has committed innumerable crimes […] he has stolen money from the Spanish Treasury”, he has assured to justify that there can be no images or busts of him in Congress.
“I don’t even want to imagine what an international delegation that comes to Spain from a democratic country thinks and sees that we have a picture of a criminal hanging on the wall of Congress,” he said.
The Congress Table, with its president Meritxell Batet at the head, will study the document in the coming days. In the body there is a majority of PSOE (three) and Unidas Podemos (three) against PP (two) and Vox (one). However, in this type of subject the purple ones are usually left alone.
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