Alex Trelinski
THE former head of the International Monetary Fund and ex-Economy Minister, Rodrigo Rato, has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for corruption offences.
A Madrid court announced the sentence on Friday which also includes a fine of over €2 million.
Rato, who already spent two years in prison over a separate embezzlement case related to his time as chairman of Bankia, has denied any wrongdoing throughout the nine-year probe.
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The court convicted Rato on three counts of offences against tax authorities amounting to an undeclared €7.4 million, as well as money laundering and corruption.
The anti-corruption prosecutor wanted Rato jailed for 70 years.
As the decision can be appealed before the Supreme Court, he will not have to serve any prison time for now until there is a final ruling, a court spokesperson said.
He made no comment over the sentence on Friday.
Rato, who chaired the IMF from 2004 to 2007 and Bankia between 2010 and 2012, previously spent two years in prison after being convicted in 2018 over the misuse of Bankia credit cards to buy jewels, holidays and expensive clothes.
On that occasion a court found him and more than 60 other former bankers guilty of using undeclared corporate credit cards.
About €12 million was spent by Caja Madrid and Bankia between 2003 and 2012.
Rato resigned as head of Bankia shortly before its near-collapse in 2012 when the government stepped in to rescue the entity.
About 200,000 small-scale savers – who had been persuaded to convert their savings into shares before Bankia’s flotation in 2011 – lost their money.
In 2020, the National Court acquitted Rato and 33 others who were tried over the stock market listing of Bankia.
He and the other defendants were accused of fraud and falsifying financial statements in relation to the bank’s 2011 stock flotation.
