The former head of accounting regulation of the Bank of Spain, Jorge Pérez, has won the financial supervisor in court, according to EL MUNDO. This critical inspector was fired from the institution after maintaining a divergent position regarding Bankia’s IPO, as he stated in the trial for that case.
The Social Court Number 41 upholds Pérez’s claim and declares the dismissal inadmissible, although it does not link the ruling to the declaration in the Bankia case. Of course, according to this ruling, dated July 7, the Bank of Spain is sentenced to readmission under the same conditions and the same job (plus the salary earned since July 2019, which in total would mean more than 360,000 euros) , or the payment of compensation of 418,215.06 euros.
In May 2019, Pérez gained notoriety by testifying in the Bankia trial with a critical point of view, since he indicated that he had been ignored by advising against the IPO of that entity in view of the real state of the accounts. For Pérez, the deterioration of Bankia was “evidence” and in the IPO prospectus “the administrators offered a price tremendously far removed from that of the financial statements”. In the Bank of Spain, however, they gave the green light to the public operation of sale of shares (OPV). The entity went bankrupt and required a rescue of around 24,000 million euros.
In July, also 2019, this inspector was definitively fired, after the Bank of Spain had investigated him on suspicion that he had leaked information to a journalist, Ernesto Ekaizer, by email. Pérez sued the Bank of Spain, understanding that the dismissal was not disciplinary despite the fact that the institution considered it so.
In the Social Court number 41 of Madrid, the Bank of Spain won the lawsuit filed by Pérez, dismissed in 2020 due to a formal defect regarding the term. The former head of Accounting Regulation appealed the order before the Court of Justice of Madrid, which also determined that Pérez’s legal actions had expired. Pérez’s legal representatives then took the case to the Supreme Court, which in a ruling issued last May validated the inspector’s claims by admitting Pérez’s appeal, thereby revoking the ruling of Social Court number 41 and claims were reactivated.
The Bank of Spain’s lawyer, once the verdict of the Supreme Court was known, declared to Court number 41 his willingness to raise an issue of unconstitutionality before the Constitutional Court. However, this July, the Social Court stated that there was no room for a question of unconstitutionality, but perhaps for an amparo remedy.
Already this July 7, the Social Court of Madrid has issued this ruling in which the demand of Pérez, an inspector since 1986 and also a former worker of Caja Madrid, an entity prior to Bankia, is partially estimated.
Pérez believes that he left the Bank of Spain for being “dissident and critical” of the heads of the supervisor and, in fact, it is proven that the Bank of Spain launched a forensic in the hands of Deloitte to find irregularities in his behavior, which which led to analyzing more than 47,000 of their emails.
Contacted by this newspaper, the Bank of Spain states that “it complies with the ruling and will analyze it” to decide whether to appeal or not. In any case, the dismissal would be inappropriate, not disciplinary, but not null either, so there is no direct attribution in the sentence that this dismissal was carried out due to Pérez’s criticism of the supervisor’s work in the IPO fiasco from Bankia.
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