Infanta Cristina and Iñaki Urdangarin have signed a divorce, as announced this Wednesday by ¡Hola! magazine. King Felipe’s sister, 58, and the former athlete, 56, have definitively ended their relationship after 26 years of marriage.
According to the publication, the former Duke and Duchess of Palma, who married in Barcelona in 1997, signed the divorce before a notary in the Catalan capital last December, although the exact date has not been revealed.
Among the details that the magazine has revealed, it stands out that the ex-couple has reached a financial agreement to cover the common expenses of their four children and that Urdangarin will not receive any compensation or pension.
The infanta and the former handball player announced in January 2022 that they had decided “by mutual agreement, to interrupt their marital relationship,” through a statement in which they stressed that their commitment to their four children remained “intact.” The marriage was blown up following the appearance of some photographs of the former Duke of Palma in the company of a woman who ended up being identified as Ainhoa ??Armentia.
It was in March 2021 when Urdangarin obtained parole and began working at the Imaz tax consulting firm.
Cristina and Iñaki got married on October 4, 1997 in a lavish wedding in Barcelona. Cristina de Borbón lived in the Catalan capital since 1992, worked at La Caixa (Foundation); He, a Basque player for Barça, also lived in Catalonia.
The couple settled in an apartment on Pedralbes Avenue and there, after being born at the Teknon Clinic, their first three children, Juan, Pablo and Miguel, were raised. Urdangarin continued playing in the Barça handball team and in the Spanish national team until 2000 and then began to work as a sports manager. His life will be marked by the master’s degree in business management that he completed at ESADE (Higher School of Business Administration and Management) where he had Diego Torres as a teacher.
The teacher saw the perfect partner in King Juan Carlos’s son-in-law. Talent and public relations at the service of the Nóos Institute, which both created to explain what everyone already knew, that sporting events, and sport in general, generate business. Theirs was to contract with public administrations, mainly the Balearic Islands and Valencia, to hold forums and conferences at exorbitant prices and, in addition, as was demonstrated in the trial, to proceed with all types of economic and fiscal irregularities. In full success, the Urdangarin Borbón moved to a tower in the Pedralbes neighborhood that they bought at a price of gold and tore down paying another fortune. A mortgage debt that Urdangarin’s businesses were going to cover, but that was not the case.
Before the catastrophe, the couple had a daughter, Irene, who completed the family. In 2009, an investigation by the Palma anti-corruption prosecutor’s office uncovered contracts between the Balearic Government and the Nóos Institute and, within two years, Urdangarin and Infanta Cristina were charged. Before, in a vain attempt to remove them from the spotlight, the couple went to live in Washington, from where they returned to settle again in Barcelona and later, in Geneva.
Iñaki Urdagarin was not in Switzerland much, in June 2018 he entered the Brieva prison (Soria) where he remained for just over two years, of the five and ten months to which he was sentenced. Little by little he was granted prison benefits, until he enjoyed an open regime in Vitoria. He worked as an orderly in a tax office and spent the night at his mother’s house, Claire Liebaert.
But when it seemed that Iñaki and Cristina, after what they have always considered an ordeal, and thanks to parole, were going to enjoy the resurrection of the couple, in January 2022 everything blew up, in the form of a furtive photo . Iñaki Udangarin had, and maintains, a romantic relationship with Ainhoa ??Armentia, a co-worker. A few days later, Iñaki and Cristina announced “the interruption of their marital relationship.” Almost two years later the divorce came.
