The Spanish National Court cleared on Tuesday former deputy prime minister Rodrigo Rato, who also served as the International Monetary Fund's director in 2004-2007, of fraud and forgery charges within the Bankia bank's initial public offering (IPO) case
MADRID (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th September, 2020) The Spanish National Court cleared on Tuesday former deputy prime minister Rodrigo Rato, who also served as the International Monetary Fund's director in 2004-2007, of fraud and forgery charges within the Bankia bank's initial public offering (IPO) case.
Rato and 33 other officials were tried over the 2011 non-transparent public listing of Bankia, Spain's fourth largest bank formerly known as Caja Madrid. They allegedly knowingly misinformed investors of the lender's true profits, or rather losses, which resulted in tens of thousands of shareholders losing their assets. Prosecutors requested an 8.5-year sentence for Rato.
"The financial information, included in the offering, was more than sufficient for wholesale and retail investors to form a reasoned criterion of company value," the court said in a ruling, obtained by Sputnik.
According to the court, the information provided by Rato and other defendants to the investors was "comprehensive and accurate" as well as "approved by all supervisory authorities."
Rato currently serves a 4.5-year prison term to which he was sentenced in 2018 over financial fraud. Investigators found that the he and 63 other Caja Madrid top managers held so-called black cards where they stored cumulatively $18 million in non-taxable personal assets during 1999-2012.
In 2012, the Spanish government saved Bankia from collapsing and its 10 million clients from bankruptcy by nationalizing the bank.
