The doubts that arose in court, to which they have gone to ratify their reports, have motivated this new request from the instructor
MADRID, 15 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The judge of the National Court in charge of the investigation of the ‘Popular case’ has requested a new expansion of the report from the experts of the Bank of Spain Teodoro Fernández and Álvaro López after a series of doubts have arisen in his statement in court of this Tuesday.
Legal sources have explained to Europa Press that the head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 4, José Luis Calama, has urged the two experts to explain in detail and in writing the relationship of some of the data contained in their first report and in the subsequent expansion.
In that first document, the experts appreciated a deficit amounting to 135 million in the entity in the year 2015. In the extension of that report, requested by the instructor, the experts concluded that the extinct entity must have reflected losses amounting to 1,019 ,897 million euros in the year of 2015 instead of the profit of 105,394 million that it declared.
The same sources explain that in Tuesday’s statement — set for the experts to ratify these reports — the Prosecutor’s Office has asked about the relationship between the two figures. That is, between the deficit amounting to 135 million first and the alleged losses of 1,019 million.
Both experts, who have ratified the rest of the issues contained in their reports, would not have offered a sufficiently clarifying answer in the eyes of the Public Ministry or the judge himself, which has motivated the request for a second extension.
On the other hand, both Fernández and López have insisted before the instructor that the quality of the data on which their last expert opinion was based was “poor, with a large number of inconsistencies, defects and inconsistencies”.
Both experts have already expressed their doubts about the first expert extension required by the judge in a letter signed by both and which was sent to the instructor on March 31, just a few days after Judge Calama urged them to prepare the same.
The instructor requested this report from the experts of the Bank of Spain on March 16, a few days after taking a statement from the inspector of the European Central Bank, Jesús Fernando Martínez Usano, who explained to the judge that the Popular carried out a release of coverage “contrary to to the norm”, estimating the deficit of provisions between 1,153 and 1,355 million euros.
The magistrate already heard on September 14 the experts from the Bank of Spain Santiago Ruiz-Clavijo and Pablo Hernández, who ratified two of the reports commissioned by Calama. Specifically, they dealt with Thesan Capital and the one related to a possible deficit of provisions in the 2015 accounts.
The first of the documents was an exhaustive report that focused on Popular’s operations that were mediated by Thesan Capital, a venture capital company specializing in the purchase of companies in crisis that operated with the bank between 2011 and 2014.
The second, on the other hand, was the expansion of a report that they themselves prepared in 2019 in order to determine whether, at the end of 2015, there was a deficit of provisions by Banco Popular and its “significance” for the accounts annual of the entity.
Waiting for a new expert extension, this cause that is close to turning five years old is foreseeably near its end. In it, the magistrate investigates two phases of the resolution process of Popular: the alleged accounting irregularities of the entity in 2016, with the capital increase, and the leaks to the press a year later that would have caused its resolution in mid-2017 .
