2023-10-16 15:34:38
The judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón, who investigates the orders made by BBVA to the retired commissioner Jose Manuel Villarejo, This Monday, as a witness, he questioned current president of the entity, Carlos Torreswhat has distanced itself from any decision in this regard until mid-2018, when the scandal broke. At that time she participated in meetings in which the matter was discussed, regarding which she referred to what is recorded in the minutes.
The owner of the Central Court of Instruction number 6 accepted the request to summon Torres proposed by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and reasoned that for this separate piece of the ‘Villarjo case’ “it is especially relevant to know if the corporate control mechanisms of the entity, in order to determine the existence of an effective culture of regulatory compliance, in order to clarify the criminal responsibility” of the bank, as published Europa Press.
The declaration, as legal sources have told this newspaper, has been developed in a tense and in some moments it has even been uncomfortable. Torres, for his part, in his capacity as a witness, has testified with total normality, answering the questions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the rest of the parties, according to bank sources.
Throughout his statement, Torres He has denied having met the commissioner or his relationship with the entity before the scandal broke out in 2018. He has explained how he landed at BBVA in 2008, going so far as to affirm that the circumstance occurred that his first day of work “It was the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt”. Regarding his relationship with the president at the time the analyzed hirings took place, Francisco González stated that in those years they had only met “at a wedding.”
In this separate piece 9 of the ‘Tandem’ macro case, both BBVA and its former president Francisco González are accused. They are investigatedThe services contracted by the bank to CENYT –Villarejo company – for different projects at least between 2004 and 2017, for which the entity would have paid the commissioner more than 10 million euros.
External independent researchers
This Monday, Torres has indicated that although when the case broke out it was handled by the internal audit department, since January 2019 everything was in the hands of external independent investigators, the Garrigues and Uría offices and the consulting firm PwC – which was in charge of perform the ‘forensic’ on the performance of the bank in the case–.
Along the way, he has asserted that in fact it is these researchers, and no one from the bank, who decides leave your name out from the list of people to investigate internally, despite the fact that initially it was on the list of keywords –‘custodians’–. Thus, it has indicated that in January 2019, when the matter passed into external hands, the entity was no longer making decisions, and it was the researchers who decided, which is why the data from its devices has never been contributed to the case.
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The judge already explained at the time that Torres’s summons was agreed upon after it had not been possible to obtain the statement from María Jesús Arribas de Paz, global legal director of the entity and the person who reported to the committee what was being done in the entity, since “she took advantage of her right not to declare of her own free will.”
It was BBVA that appealed the magistrate’s decision to call Arribas de Paz herself to court. He alleged that his statement could violate the duty of professional secrecy and the attorney-client privilege, in addition to the right of defense of the entity itself. And, in BBVA’s opinion, this subpoena sought to force Arribas de Paz to testify “as a witness about facts of which she has had knowledge solely and exclusively through her work, as a legal professional and as an internal lawyer of the entity”.
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