For three years now, Swiss prosecutors have been trying to find out whether a payment of $ 100 million from the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to the former King of Spain was a bribe.

Geneva public prosecutor Yves Bertossa even asked legal scholars to help him find out whether the payment to Juan Carlos I was considered “wrongdoing in public office”.

On Monday (December 13), three years after the investigation began, the court finally found that there was no “sufficient” link between the former King of Saudi Arabia’s funds and a bank account with ties to Juan Carlos, the former Spaniard gave king.

But why did a Swiss public prosecutor’s office investigate a historic payment between a former king and a deceased, neither of them from Switzerland? It was embarrassing for the Swiss that their banks supported the suspicious flow of money.

Swiss bank fined for royal money laundering

In 2008, huge sums of money flowed into a Swiss bank account of the Panamanian Lucum Foundation at Mirabaud, a historic Swiss private bank based in Geneva. The funds amounted to $ 100 million and came from the Saudi Arabian Treasury.

From this account, whose beneficial owner was Juan Carlos, 65 million euros (73.3 million US dollars) were transferred to a company belonging to his former lover, Princess Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Danish-German entrepreneur. The Mirabaud account was closed shortly afterwards in 2012.

Payment was made through a Lucum Foundation account registered in Panama. According to documents from the Spanish newspaper The country, the account was opened with the Bahamas subsidiary of another Swiss bank, Gonet & Cie.

In a recorded conversation between Sayn-Wittgenstein and former Spanish investigator José Villarejo that leaked to the online newspaper The Spanish, Sayn-Wittgenstein mentioned the payment in connection with a Saudi railroad deal.