Rodrigo Rato y Figaredo, José María Aznar’s all-powerful economic vice president, is closer to returning to prison. The Provincial Court of Madrid sentenced him this Friday to four years, nine months and one day in prison in the case over the origin of his fortune. In a 1,200-page ruling, the court considers it proven that Rato defrauded the Treasury in three years, tried to hide the illicit origin of part of his assets and collected two million euros in bribes for rigging Bankia advertising contracts.
The sentence is well below the request made by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which requested 63 years in prison for 11 tax crimes, money laundering and corruption between individuals. But it opens the door to his return to prison, where he was already for two years after being convicted for the Caja Madrid ‘black’ cards scandal. Rato announced this Friday that he will appeal the sentence before the Supreme Court, so the ruling will not be final until it is pronounced. Meanwhile, the Court could agree to his return to prison if he sees a risk of escape, as happened after the first sentence of the Gürtel, where the sentences were much higher; or impose some type of precautionary measure, such as the payment of bail, according to the sources consulted.
In any case, this second conviction is a hard blow for the man whom Aznar’s PP enthroned as the symbol of the “Spanish economic miracle.” After the conviction for spending almost 100,000 euros with ‘black’ cards and his acquittal for the Bankia IPO fiasco, the former politician faced this third trial with a defiant attitude. He refused to answer the questions of the anti-corruption prosecutor, whom he accused of having set up a “fabulation”; and charged against the officials who investigated his assets. “I don’t know where these people come from”, “it’s outrageous” or “they take us for fools”, were the disqualifications with which he addressed the Treasury technicians and the State lawyer during the hearing.
Furthermore, in the last session of the trial he used his right to the last word to defend his innocence and point to the Ministers of Finance and Justice of Mariano Rajoy’s Executive Cristóbal Montoro and Rafael Catalá as those responsible for this last stage of judicial ordeal. He dropped that months before his high-profile arrest, when he was placed in a Customs agents’ car, both were aware of the actions of the Tax Agency.
“Monstrous” accusation
The ruling shows that the judges who followed the more than fifty sessions of the hearing have only partially accepted the allegations of their lawyer, María Massó, who defended that the entire case was a “house of cards” that would collapse with just a few “snorts” and that he described the accusation against his client as “monstrous.” On the other hand, prosecutor Elena Lorente defined Rato as a “gentleman accustomed to commanding”, with “extraordinary power”, but who made laundering and hiding funds a “modus operandi” and who presented himself before Justice as a “ “stateless prosecutor” to avoid his conviction.
The reality is that the ruling limits tax crimes to three years in the face of the very harsh accusation of the Prosecutor’s Office, which defended that the criminal activity had begun in 1999, when he was minister and vice president, and had continued to develop when he was president of the IMF, Caja Madrid and Bankia. And consequently, he was attributed 11 tax crimes.
In any case, the resolution considers it proven that Rato committed tax fraud in two ways. On the one hand, hiding money that he had abroad from the Treasury. And, on the other hand, billing through instrumental companies for services that he provided personally, such as his hiring as an advisory director at Telefónica.
The other leg of the case is the alleged irregularities of his time at Bankia, whose presidency he became in 2010 in the midst of a power struggle between Rajoy and Esperanza Aguirre, who preferred Ignacio González for that position. Rato held that position until May 2012.
The Prosecutor’s Office maintained during the trial that knowing that advertising expenses due to the expansion of the brand and its IPO were going to be high, Rato tried to “take personal financial advantage.” At the hearing, Rato denied having given any “indications” to anyone about those contracts, arguing that he was not qualified because he was not “an expert in marketing or advertising.”
But in the sentence, the judges consider it proven that Rato committed a crime of corruption between individuals by imposing that the Publicis and Zenith agencies obtain advertising contracts from the entity in exchange for a bribe of 2,022,154.52 euros. Money that was shared with Alberto Portuondo, one of his alleged front men, also sentenced to a sentence of three months and one day in prison and a fine of half of the commission received, in addition to the confiscation of that amount.
However, the Provincial Court acquits both the employees of Publicis and Zenith (and both companies), as well as some of their most loyal collaborators, who according to Anti-Corruption had formed a “pressure group” in the entity. This is the case of his personal secretary since 1983, Teresa Arellano; or the one who was his ‘number two’ at Caja Madrid, José Manuel Fernández Norniella. The judges understand that they did not participate in the corrupt act.
This investigation began after it became known that Rato took advantage of the tax amnesty approved by the Rajoy Government in 2012. Before the court, he acknowledged that he had been “wrong” to take advantage of that measure, since he mistakenly thought that it was “the right way”. easier” to bring out the funds he had in three companies abroad.
In her report, the prosecutor insisted that “far from having regularized [fondos] neither administratively nor, even less so, criminally” did he use that measure “as a vehicle for laundering or cleaning up the illicit defrauded fees that he had been carrying for years.” His defense, however, insisted that, in this way, he had “erased the crime.” The last word has been had by the judges of the Provincial Court, who have proven irregularities although with the intensity defended by the Prosecutor’s Office.
The condemnation of the ‘black’ and the acquittal of Bankia
Rato adds this sentence to the one received for taking money from Caja Madrid. In his case, the 99,054 euros he spent using the ‘black’ card with which he paid for trips to the snow, parties, alcohol and luxury bags. The sentence, confirmed by the Supreme Court in October 2018, attributes to him and his predecessor, Miguel Blesa, who committed suicide in July 2017, the maintenance of a system that allowed the leadership of the entity to “dispose of the money at will.” money from the Fund for their personal expenses or any other expenses they decided.
The existence of these “black cards for tax purposes” was revealed in an investigation by elDiario.es in 2013. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, of which he spent just over two behind bars after achieving parole in February. of 2021.
The second of the trials he has faced did have a good ending for the former PP politician. In September 2020, the National Court acquitted him and the other 33 managers accused of crimes of defrauding investors and accounting falsehood in Bankia’s IPO. The court understood that its collapse after a failed market entry could not be attributed to the bank’s management team because the decisions that were adopted were based, or even urged, by the supervisors and the new laws on the financial sector that were being enacted in Spain and in the European Union.
That was the line of defense that followed during this trial, since Rato has never considered himself responsible for the actions that led to the ruin of shareholders and preference holders. In 2012, the bank needed an injection of 22,000 million public money and Rato ended up leaving through the back door with the help of his friend Mariano Rajoy, who had only been in Moncloa for a few months and had to take charge of the collapse of an entity systemic and in whose appointments he had had a lot to do.
The Zaplana precedent
The resolution against Rato follows the one that, two months ago, was issued by the Valencia Court against another of Aznar’s strong men: the former Government spokesperson and Minister of Labor, Eduardo Zaplana. His sentence was higher, ten years and five months in prison, for the illicit commissions he received after intervening in the process of awarding the privatization of the ITV.
This ruling proves that Zaplana collected illicit commissions throughout his political career in the PP. The ruling considered it proven that the former minister, his front man and his accountant laundered bribes for a total of 16.2 million euros in Luxembourg, Panama and Andorra and assigned him “especially reprehensible” conduct for having ordered the rigging of that million-dollar award being “maximum responsible” of the Valencian Government.
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