The British Council Refugee (BCR), a small non-profit NGO based in London, has received two new donations totalling three million pounds (3.5 million euros), bringing the total received from a generous bequest to 6.6 million pounds (7.6 million euros).
The point here is that these funds were donated posthumously by the Spanish businessman and banker Romero Maura, who died in 2022 and who for many years was a confidant and close friend of the King Emeritus of Spain, Juan Carlos I. This money is said to have come from a fortune hidden within an opaque financial structure based in the tax haven of the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, and is believed to form part of the former king's 15 million euros concealed from the Spanish justice system. When the Spanish authorities began investigating the Spanish head of state, he distributed his undeclared fortune across various accounts around the world, placing them in the names of people he trusted (or former lovers, such as Corinna Larsen). And according to sources at the newspaper El País, the former monarch is extremely angry about the whole affair.
Romero Maura, a widower with no children, decided that this money would never again go back into Juan Carlos I's accounts, and immediately set out in writing his wish that, upon his death, the money be distributed to charitable and social welfare causes. In particular, to those supporting children, whom he was never able to have of his own.
The banker and Oxford history lecturer has also donated his two homes in the United Kingdom (London) and France (Périgord), complete with parking spaces, valued at a further five million pounds (5.8 million euros), as well as the balance of a Swiss bank account, as acknowledged by the organisation and confirmed by a relative of the donor.