Rodrigo Rato has sat down again today in the dock. After the conviction for the 'black cards' and the acquittal in the Bankia case, he faces his third trial for his fortune abroad. He faces 70 years in prison for various tax crimes and money laundering, among others.
For more than three hours, his lawyer has tried to dismantle the origin of the case full of irregularities and illegalities and accusing the judge, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office and especially the Treasury of creating a general case against the former vice president of the Government, former Minister of Economy, former President of Bankia and former director of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato.
The lawyer has tried to convince the court of the Provincial Court of Madrid that the origin of the case was a risk report from the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONIF) prepared with an absolute "lack of rigor" and even so it served to create a "mendacious" complaint by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office.
For the lawyer, obtaining all the evidence against Rato should be annulled because the searches ordered by the judge were full of irregularities. "The text of the Prosecutor's Office itself says one thing and the opposite," the defense has indicated.
Rato's entourage suspects that behind the case opened after its tax regularization was the extended hand of the Treasury, at that time directed by Minister Cristóbal Montoro.
In fact, the lawyer has requested the statement of the former Justice Minister of Mariano Rajoy's Government, Rafael Català. The Court had already rejected his statement as a witness, however after learning of the investigation opened in a Tarragona Court linked to the spurious use of the Treasury, Rato believes that Catalá's testimony is now "relevant." The reason is that he made public statements about Rato's tax regularization when, in his opinion, they were private data that only the Tax Agency should have.
The Prosecutor's Office requests a prison sentence of up to 70 years for him for 11 crimes against the Public Treasury, one crime of money laundering, another of punishable insolvency, another of corruption in business, and another continued crime of falsifying a document. official and commercial in the framework of the case regarding the alleged illicit increase of his assets.
According to the indictment of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the man who was also president of the IMF would have maintained hidden assets from the Public Treasury since 1999 through various companies with which he would have carried out continuous financial investment activities through bank accounts in the Bahamas, Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom, among other places.
The analysis of the seized documentation, the Prosecutor's Office noted, made it possible to identify unjustified increases in assets between 2005 and 2015 for a total amount of 15.6 million euros, in addition to income from movable capital abroad that was also not declared to the Treasury.
In light of such documentation, and according to the report of July 7, 2020 carried out by the AEAT Unit attached to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, they concluded that fees amounting to 7.4 million euros were defrauded.
The Prosecutor's Office also recalled that Rato took advantage of the tax amnesty in November 2012 and pointed out that he omitted any reference to several companies he owned, thus declaring assets abroad of 115,000 euros and paying the Spanish Treasury 11,500 euros.
Anti-corruption indicated in this regard that Rato, "far from having regularized, neither administratively nor, even less, criminally, his fortune, he actually used the special tax declaration (DTE) as a vehicle for laundering or cleaning up the illicit defrauded contributions that he had been carrying for years." years for their foreign assets".
