Rodrigo Rato, sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for defrauding the Treasury and money laundering

The court of Section number 7 of this hearing, in a ruling of more than 1,100 pages of which President Ángela Acevedo herself was the speaker, appreciates undue delays due to the time that the case has lasted.

Rato himself has gone to the headquarters of the Provincial Court of Madrid to collect his sentence, given that the notification was personal and it cannot be replaced. Upon arrival, after being asked what he expects from this resolution, he responded to the journalists “have a good time.”

It should be remembered that in her indictment, the anti-corruption prosecutor Elena Lorente of the case requested more than 70 years in prison for Rato for having allegedly defrauded the Treasury of 8.5 million euros. It indicated that the former minister had maintained hidden assets from the Public Treasury since 1999 through various companies with which he had carried out continuous financial investment activities through bank accounts in the Bahamas, Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom, among other places.

The analysis of the seized documentation, the Prosecutor’s Office pointed out, made it possible to identify unjustified asset increases between 2005 and 2015 for a total amount of 15.6 million euros, in addition to income from movable capital abroad that was also not declared to the Treasury. In light of such documentation, and according to the report of July 7, 2020 carried out by the AEAT Unit attached to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, they concluded that there were defrauded fees in the amount of 7.4 million euros.

The Prosecutor’s Office also recalled that Rato took advantage of the tax amnesty in November 2012 and pointed out that he omitted any reference to several companies he owned, thus declaring assets abroad of 115,333.50 euros and paying the Spanish Treasury 11,533.35.

Anti-corruption indicated in this regard that Rato, “far from having regularized, neither administratively nor, even less, criminally, his fortune, he actually used the special tax declaration (DTE) as a vehicle for laundering or cleaning up the illicit defrauded contributions that he had been carrying for years.” years for their foreign assets.

It should be remembered that in this trial the case has been heard in its entirety for Rato, given that in 2019 the Provincial Court decided to annul the prosecution related to the piece in which it was investigated. the alleged collection of 835,000 euros in commissions by the former president of the International Monetary Fund and president of Caja Madrid for contracting Bankia’s advertising for its IPO with two specific agencies. For this matter, the Prosecutor’s Office requested four years in prison.

The Court ordered the head of the Court of Instruction number 31 of Madrid to accumulate all the pieces that make up the well-known ‘Rato case’ to convert it into a single process. The magistrates explained in their order that in this way they would avoid “contradictory statements” that could arise if the ten pieces that were open to clarify the origin of Rato’s assets were judged separately.

The other causes of Rato

Already in September 2020, José María Aznar’s former vice president learned of the ruling of the National Court that acquitted him for the 2011 listing of Bankia, an entity he directed at that time.

Prior to hearing this acquittal, he was already sentenced by the National Court to four and a half years. for the case of ‘black’ cards of the defunct Caja Madrid, a sentence that was confirmed in October 2018 by the Supreme Court and that forced him to enter the Madrid prison of Soto del Real.