‘eldiario.es’ reserves €60,000 in its annual accounts to pay possible compensation to Julio Iglesias and 13 other lawsuits
elDiario.es has reserved in its annual accounts for the financial year 2025 a provision of 60,000 euros to face thirteen judicial proceedings opened against the company, whose amounts claimed exceed the 5.3 million euros. That accounting documentation It also expressly cites the demand of the singer Julio Iglesias against Ignacio Escolar’s newspaperpresented months after the close of the year, which still does not appear among those litigations already quantified.
The information is contained in the Annual Report and the Management Report that accompany the annual accounts of the publishing company, Diario de Prensa Digital SLdeposited in the Commercial Registry of Madrid, corresponding to the year ended December 31, 2025.
Note 10 of the Report, dedicated to «Provisions and Contingencies», details that «at the end of the fiscal year 2025 and 2024 the Company has several open judicial proceedings». The document lists them from one to thirteen.
These include lawsuits for right to honor, privacy and protection of personal data presented by individuals such as Ángeles Muñoz, mayor of Marbella; Juli Carbó, businessman cohousing; Francisco Baena, lawyer; or Manuel Damián Cantero Berlanga, police officer; in addition to a contentious appeal from the Spanish Data Protection Agency.
The largest litigation is the one brought by the lawyer Pedro Muñoz and his company that claims 5,000,000 euros and in which it also appears as sued the director of elDiario.esIgnacio Arsenio Escolar, who began his career in journalism but, As he said, he didn’t finish it. The Report itself qualifies this million-dollar risk as “remote».
Adding the amounts that do appear in the document (not all procedures include an amount), The total claimed is around 5.3 million euros.
Despite this, as they say, “legal advisors consider unlikely that none of them prosper,” according to the Report. The only accounting precaution is an allocation “of 60,000 euros of expenses for prudence due to the possibility that some of the lawsuits filed are successful.
The ‘Julio Iglesias case’
Julio Iglesias’ lawsuit It does not appear in that list of thirteen procedures and does appear in another section.. The Management Report places it in the “Important events since the end of the financial year” section, that is, as an event after the balance sheet date.
The text indicates that, “at the date of formulation, it is pending celebration of the conciliation act promoted by Mr. Julio Iglesias against society, its director and four editors, scheduled for next May 28. This is a mandatory preliminary procedure before a possible criminal complaint for libel and slander. As OKDIARIO has learned, the conciliation act ended without an agreement between the parties, leading the Spanish music legend to file the corresponding lawsuit in the courts of law.
The Report specifies that, at this stage, “the plaintiff “has not definitively quantified the economic claim,” although it is expected that he will do so in a future complaint. For this reason, and “according to the assessment of the legal advisors, it is not considered necessary to make a provision for liabilities at the closing date.”
The media have reported that Iglesias’ lawyers They will claim 200 million euros for damagesa figure that, if confirmed, would mean bankruptcy closure of the editor, as the newspaper’s director himself has acknowledged. That amount, however, does not appear in any accounting document of the company.
Background to the dispute
The controversy with Julio Iglesias started after the publication of an alleged investigation —allegedly developed together with the American chain Univision— in which two former workers accuse the singer of sexual assault. The journalistic investigations, as explained by Ignacio Escolar, began in January 2023.
The singer has described the accusations as “mounting» and has initiated the conciliation process demanding a rectification that the newspaper has refused. «We reaffirm ourselves in all the articles we have published,” wrote Escolar, who has described several statements included in the conciliation demand as false.
Aside from the litigation, the accounts show a company with a turnover of 16.9 million in 2025, 12% more than the previous year, and a positive result of 1.28 million euros. The company, founded in 2012, maintains a shareholder structure in which “more than 70% of the share capital” is in the hands of editorial professionals, with Ignacio Escolar as reference partner with 40.07% of the shares.
It remains to be seen if that balance will be enough of a cushion. compared to a number—the 200 million that I could claim for Julio Iglesias—that no account book of a Spanish newspaper, no matter how meticulous, could sustain.