“After nine years, I have the respect with you that I should have”. Rodrigo Rato was haughty and vehement yesterday in the second session dedicated to his interrogation at the court of the Provincial Court of Madrid, which is trying him for the accusation of having diverted money outside of Spain to avoid the Treasury.
The session was tense but correct from the start. Who was vice-president of the Spanish Government, president of Bankia and managing director of the IMF led a judicial session filled with allusions to the Prosecutor’s Office questioning its work over the past nine years.
Rato accused them of holding crimes against him “without foundation”, of acting in the investigation “with impunity” and without taking responsibility for the mistakes made throughout the trial and even of “using inquisitorial practices”.
The tension led the anti-corruption prosecutor, Elena Lorente, to ask for respect for her work after receiving continuous criticism of her work from the former minister, who is on trial for the alleged illicit increase in his wealth.
Without palliatives, Rato told him that “respect is earned”, and added: “After nine years with the open cause, I have the respect with you that I should have”.
The former Minister of Economy questioned the judge directly. “Madam president, I will not tell you about the weather, but this is really amazing. Someone had to say it, because we are all bigots. That is to say, that the Spanish Administration asks us for respect and does not know that the quotations of the currencies change, so what do you want me to tell you? You can’t believe it”, he insisted.
Rodrigo Rato, who is facing a sentence of nearly 70 years in prison for a fraud of more than 8.5 million euros, if he showed remorse it was not for the facts of which he is accused. What the former Minister of Economy regrets is having resorted “voluntarily” to the process opened by the Tax Agency in 2012, when it invited taxpayers to regularize their finances in foreign accounts through the famous models 750 and 720 “I was probably wrong, given the results. When this regularization is proposed, I join in with the intention of not only regularizing, as the word indicates, there are no more secrets, but to repatriate the money to Spain”, he assured.
Among the matters under study by the Prosecutor’s Office was also whether Rato had to declare income from advertising campaigns of the company Cor Comunicación. On this subject, once again the ex-minister was scandalized and pointed out that the accusation’s argument is “peregrine” because, in his opinion, it states that “two Ibex companies falsified their accounting” for give him “a bonus”. “Well, insane,” he added.
