Congress blames supervisors for irregular management of the crisis

Congress blames supervisors for irregular management of the crisis

Accused of "inaction" to the Bank of Spain and the CNMV, despite the fact that the lawyers of the Cortes warn that this enables lawsuits

   The alleged parliamentary consensus to assess the causes of the crisis has led to a string of accusations from all the political parties over who were at the head of the Bank of Spain and the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) in the worst years of the recession, between 2010 and 2013. The opinion of the congressional commission that has investigated for months what happened in those years, but also before and after, bears most of the responsibility on the financial and stock market supervisors. The former attributes a "serious irregularity" in the 2010 accounts of the savings banks that were transferred to Bankia. Both are also responsible for a total "inaction" in the commercialization of preferred shares in banking.

   That is, roughly, the opinion of 200 pages that this Thursday endorsed the plenary session of the lower house with the vote in favor of all political groups, except Citizens. The party led by Albert Rivera was dissociated because the text makes no mention of the politicization of the addresses of savings banks as one of the causes of the crisis.

Among other considerations, the commission indicates that the supervisors "did not meet their obligations"; that they acted with a policy that "at least" -says the document- "can be described as lax" when it comes to monitoring and taking measures to prevent the crisis from being as hard as it finally turned out; and even points to his "passivity" after the appearance of inspectors from the Bank of Spain.

Urge the Office of the Prosecutor

Although most of these considerations were already known since they were published at the end of November of last year, during these months the lawyers of the Cortes would have warned the political parties of the legal consequences that these accusations can have from now on, once validated by Congress. They came to advise to modify, at least, the writing of the texts.

In fact, the judicial door has been opened, because this Thursday, the spokesman of Unidos Podemos in the commission, Alberto Garzón, defended on the platform that the opinion "could serve" to clarify possible criminal consequences. And he insisted on transferring that text to the Office of the Prosecutor to investigate indications of crime.

The conclusions also include a series of recommendations to avoid future economic and financial crises. Among them, the creation of a macroprudential authority - the Council of Ministers will approve this Friday the creation of this organism among institutions - alerting of future risks; the implementation of a user protection agency; or the reinforcement of the independence of the supervisors.