The president of BBVA, Carlos Torres, has defended before the judge in the Tándem case that due to his previous positions in the entity he never knew of the existence of contracts with the company of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo until the scandal broke to the press.
Torres had been summoned to testify as a witness by the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón, who is investigating within the Tándem case a piece on the hiring of Villarejo by BBVA from 2003 to 2017 to carry out espionage work. and for which the previous president, Francisco González, is being investigated. Among other things, he would have been tasked with finding out who was behind the attempt to take a stake in BBVA by Sacyr at the end of 2004.
According to Torres, who before becoming president held other positions in the entity, such as CEO, it was not until June or July 2018 that he found out about the contracts with the Cenyt company.
The judge wants to know if the corporate control mechanisms worked, in order to determine the existence of an effective culture of regulatory compliance, in order to clarify the criminal liability of the banking entity.
It was then that an internal audit was initially ordered to find out the details of that hiring, months later, in January 2019 - precisely when Torres became president - to hire an external audit. As the president of the entity has insisted to the judge, the order he has given is to be transparent, of "total collaboration", with the judicial investigation and the audit.
This statement is contrary to the thesis maintained by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which maintains that the bank has sent "partial, biased and incomplete" information to the Court, making it difficult to ascertain the facts.
