WHEN officers from Madrid’s municipal police force busted an illegal after hours club in the Spanish capital on Sunday morning, they discovered minors, drugs including marijuana and so-called ‘pink cocaine’ and hookah pipes. And among the patrons was none other than Felipe Juan Froilán de Marichalar y Borbón, the nephew of Spain’s King Felipe VI and the fourth in line to the throne.
According to news agency EFE, officers were alerted to the club by residents, who were bothered by the noise. The venue had a licence as a sauna rather than a nightclub.
Despite having a maximum legal capacity for the venue of 99, the club was found by officers to have 229 people inside, including the grandson of former king Juan Carlos I.
The 24-year-old, who is widely known in Spain simply as ‘Froilán’, was in the headlines over Christmas after reports emerged that he had been implicated by police in a mass brawl involving knives that took place outside another Madrid nightclub.
According to the online daily El Confidencial, the police were investigating him for the possible charge of affray. He denied having had anything to do with the incident.
‘If anything, I am a victim,’ he said at the time. ‘And not even that. I am a witness to what happened.’
The newspaper also reported that he got into a fight in a bar after trying to jump the queue for the bathroom, while it claimed that his sister, Victoria Federica, 22, had crashed her car into several vehicles in the upscale Salamanca neighbourhood. Froilán was supposedly in the passenger seat.
After those incidents, it was announced that the youngster would be travelling to Abu Dhabi, where he would live for a time with his grandfather Juan Carlos.
His night out in Madrid was, according to website Lecturas, a last party before he returned to the United Arab Emirates, where the self-styled emeritus king has been living since 2020 in self-imposed exile after a series of financial scandals emerged.
Aside from his nocturnal exploits, Froilán is also infamous for having accidentally shot himself in the foot while on a farm in 2012. The episode was reminiscent for many Spaniards of a tragic incident in 1956, when a young Juan Carlos accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, Alfonso, with a firearm.
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