Will This Former King’s Scandals Sink the Spanish Royal Family?

The Spanish royal family must have hoped that a decision by the former king, Juan Carlos, to exile himself from Spain earlier this month would have drawn a line under the financial scandals linked to him that have blackened the family’s name in recent years.

If so, they were probably reckoning without his ex-lover, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, giving an explosive in-depth interview to the BBC in which she described intimate details of her relationship with Juan Carlos, said her life was threatened by Spanish secret police and testified that she was “very surprised” to be given a lump sum of €65m ($77m) by the king, describing it as, “an enormously generous gift.”

She suggested that she might be persuaded to return the money if it turns out it is “illegal”, but only if “everyone else” does too.