According to the Bank of Spain, taxpayers will lose 70% of public funds used to rescue Spanish savings banks. The Government, back in the day of the bank rescue, promised that the money would all be recovered.
The Government bailed out the banks with around 40,000 million euros, whilst at the same slashing the budgets for Education and Public Health; something, by the way, that they had sworn they would not do.
The Bank of Spain, whose very existence is to regulate and watch the Spanish banking sector, estimate that 27,344 million euros have been lost. The Governor of the Bank of Spain blames everybody, except the B.o.S. itself, which is ironic.
Most of the regional savings banks were in the hands of conservative regional governments: Novacaixagalicia, Banco de Valencia, Caja Castilla-La Mancha and Caja Madrid, but the socialists and Catalan regionalists have their share of the blame.
These are the savings banks that were run into the ground by politicians on the governing boards, misusing bank capital to fund Pharaonic public projects in order to gain votes: completely superfluous airports that have never seen a commerical passenger flight land, in the case of Valencia, for example.
Precisely because the savings banks were going under, the then Government under the socialists forced a fusion of provincial saving banks thus creating the national bank, Bankia, which went bust itself and was why Spain requested a bail out.
The Chairman of Bankia, by the way, was the ex-Spanish Head of the World Monetary Fund, Sr. Rodrigo, who is presently in prison for fraud, awaiting other charges to be judged.
It’s worth emphasising that all the cuts to sensitive sectors in public spending would have been unnecessary had, firstly, the savings bank not been colonised by politicians with absolutely no banking experience, and secondly, had they not been bailed out.
Editorial comment: Quite a few politicians need to go to prison and have their own personal wealth confiscated. The Chinese put corrupt or inept bureaucrats up against the wall and shoot them – one billion Chinese can’t all be wrong.
(News: Spain)