MADRID (Reuters) – A Spanish High Court judge proposed on Monday that former Banco Popular chairman Angel Ron and 12 of the bank’s former executives stand trial on charges of investor fraud following the collapse of the lender in June 2017, a court document showed.
Banco Popular, saddled with big debts, became the first bank to be wound down using new European rules aimed at avoiding taxpayer funded bailouts.
The court said that judge Jose Luis Calama had completed his investigation and proposed trying Ron, the executives and consultancy firm PriveWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for allegedly defrauding investors and committing false accounting on a 2016 capital increase in which investors were “deceived”.
According to Calama, the financial statements for that year and 2015 “did not reflect a true and fair view of the balance sheet or equity”.
Neither Ron nor PwC were immediately available for comment.
(Reporting by Jesús Aguado, edititng by Andrei Khalip and David Latona)
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