The National Court reopens the investigation into the capital increase of Banco Popular in 2012 | Companies

2024-01-16 19:56:50

The National Court reopens the second case on Banco Popular, the one related to the capital increase in 2012. The Criminal Chamber has revoked the file that the investigating judge Santiago Pedraz agreed to, last November, of this investigation that was directs against the former president of the entity Ángel Ron, the former CEO Roberto Higuera, as well as PwC, the consulting firm that audited the entity’s accounts, following the criteria of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which requested the provisional dismissal.

In an order, dated this Monday, the magistrates of the Second Section of the Criminal Chamber indicate that the instructor should have called the Bank of Spain inspectors designated as judicial experts to ratify the report that motivated Anti-Corruption to request to the case file. This document concludes that the capital increase carried out by Banco Popular in 2012 for 2,500 million euros was a “good investment”, since the bank had a good performance on the stock market in the following three years.

Likewise, the experts recalled that the operation was carried out to execute the order of the Bank of Spain and the so-called Guindos decrees – named after the then Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos – to comply with the requirements of increasing minimum coverage for operations. of real estate financing, in a context of economic crisis.

The result of the analysis by the Bank of Spain – which was waited for more than a year, since it was one of the first proceedings ordered by the investigating judge – was shared in its entirety by the prosecutor Belén Dorremochea, in whose last writing addressed to the judge she pointed out that the capital increase “occurred in a context of serious global economic crisis that forced the different States to adopt measures to alleviate the situation.” In this sense, the head of the Central Investigative Court number 5 of the National Court agreed to the dismissal as he saw no indications that the bank resolved in June 2017 falsified the economic-financial information contained in the information brochures about the operation.

Now, the Criminal Chamber, which has partially upheld the appeal presented by the group of minority shareholders who promoted this case with the filing of a complaint, considers that the instructor should summon the experts of the Bank of Spain to testify “given the relevance for the future of this process (…) especially because it has based a decision to dismiss the case” with the objective that its conclusions “can be submitted to the contradiction of the parties.”

Likewise, the Second Section indicates in its order that the interrogation, consisting of the ratification of the report, will allow the judge to make a decision on the need to carry out new procedures.

The decision of the Criminal Chamber is announced just one day after the investigating judge of the National Court José Luis Calama, who has investigated the main case on Banco Popular (focused on the 2016 capital increase and the possible leak of information), will inform the parties that it will notify the order of transformation to an abbreviated procedure in the first half of February, that is, it will announce which investigations there are indications of crime and proposes to judge.

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