Former BES boss Ricardo Salgado is up before the Swiss banking regulator FINMA today and tomorrow.
The subject for Salgado’s next stream of smoothly delivered excuses is the collapse of Banque Privée Espírito Santo which the Swiss had to wind up.
“On September 19, 2014, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority began bankruptcy procedures against Banque Privée Espírito Santo” according to a statement issued at the time.
The Swiss move was not long after the Dubai authorites froze all transactions at Espírito Santo Bankers Dubai, rendering it unable to operate and unable to repay a loan to its Swiss partner.
This gave the Swiss the excuse they needed to purge its system of Banque Privée Espírito Santo.
Ricardo Salgado will be in good company, quite a family reunion in fact, as joining him in front of the formidable regulator will be José Manuel Espírito Santo Silva, Michel Renaud, Ricardo Salgado, António Ricciardi, Jean-Claud Blanc and Catarina Salgado Amon.
Banque Privée Espírito Santo was a Swiss offshoot of Grupo Espírito Santo which went bust as the financial empire built largely on deceit and a distorted version of morality, collapsed last summer.
Despite the polite invitation from the Swiss for those involved to have a chance to explain the circumstances surrounding Banque Privée’s collapse, some of the invitees have declined to appear.
The forensic audit of Banco Espíito Santo, requested by the Bank of Portugal, reported that BES, led by Ricardo Salgado, had used its own companies in Panama and Switzerland to continue funding the Espírito Santo Group which is not playing the game at all, in fact the Swiss are able to ‘impose sanctions.’
It is not known on whom sanctions would be hurtful as none of the companies involved are still trading and those involved in overseeing the empire's crash have lost personal credibility, their continued employment being due only to the old boys’ network which still operates among Portugal's so called elite.
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And so, Peter Rabbit, Cavaco Silva and Carlos Costa collaborated in pretending that all was OK, including the sale of worthless bonds to ordinary Portuguese investors, until the final repayment was made to the Troika, and then allowed the whole edifice to collapse.
Which goes to show that the elite here in Portugal will do anything to protect their precious backsides, but the ordinary investor gets no protection at all. And that the Troika, if not actively involved in the cover-up, is at least complaisant.
And they wonder why so many people are becoming disillusioned with the EU and its myrmidons! Portugal needs its equivalent of UKIP.