What’s more, close to 250 directors and board members of these banks have been investigated for their direct or indirect involvement in financial wrongdoing. The scandal over the crisis affecting Spain’s failed savings banks worsened because at the same time as the state was cutting basic public services, more and more taxpayers’ money was being poured into rescuing the savings banks. Linde admitted before Congress in July 2012, a month after he took office, that the Bank of Spain “acted with little decisiveness and insufficiently and inadequately our supervision was not successful.” The governor’s stance follows criticism of the central bank’s actions in the past, although he has never taken a step such as that he is suggesting now. It now appears a parliamentary commission will be set up to look into the crisis “I have no reason to think that the Bank of Spain did not act according to the general interest and respecting the law, but this does not mean, naturally that it was right every time,” he says. But the governor says it is important to distinguish between mistakes and actions that might be subject to legal censure. Linde admits in his article in EL PAÌS that international and national institutions, including the Bank of Spain, committed “serious forecasting” errors during the crisis. The initiative comes in the wake of revelations that up to December 2015, the cost of restructuring Spain’s failed savings banks had risen to €60.7 billion, of which €41.8 billion was provided by the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB) and €18.9 billion from the banks’ Guarantee Deposit Fund, according to Spain’s Audit Office, which states in a report that the cost to the Spanish state and the sector “committed” to the banks so far has been €122.1 billion, but that the final cost will not be known until all the savings banks have been sold off. Opposition parties Ciudadanos and Podemos have the support of the country’s largest opposition party, the Socialists (PSOE), in calling for a commission to look into the crisis, something that the ruling Popular Party (PP) has blocked to date.Įconomy Minister Luis de Guindos said recently he is prepared to accept “what parliament decides.” The PP no longer enjoys an absolute majority in Congress, meaning that the commission that Linde seems to be indirectly calling for could now be set up. Linde has admitted that the Bank of Spain failed in many aspects of its handling of the crisis
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