In his role of ‘wolf of wall street’had to manage the money of 181 clients of private banking BBVA. Therefore, millions of euros passed through his hands, from which he had to make a profit, but never risking more than the owners of the funds would allow. However, and as indicated by the Justice in a sentence to which this newspaper has had access, the adviser decided to forge the signatures of three clients, bypass all the bank’s security protocols and, with the 6.1 million euros they had saved, created a hole for BBVA €50 million.
For this reason, the Provincial Court of Madrid has now sentenced him to six years in jailto pay a fine of 3,800 euros and indemnify with 50.7 million plus interest to the entity for which he worked for a decade for a continued crime of unfair administration. Against the sentence, handed down on February 22, 2023, there is still room for appeal before the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid.
The adviser, according to the judicial documentation, would have come into contact for the first time with the three clients managing their accounts in Switzerland, where BBVA has an office in Zurich. In May 2013, when it was relocated to the Assets Center of BBVA’s Central Territorial Department in Madrid, a place that BBVA itself defines as “the most exclusive and specialized area of BBVA’s private banking.” “A unit that is dedicated to the comprehensive management of personal, family and business assets of clients or groups that have a high level of wealth (above the 2 million euros in BBVA) and that require more sophisticated advice”.
From there, from the heart of the private banking of one of the most important financial institutions in the world, he continued to manage the portfolios of the victims, who were looking for a low to medium risk for their savings.
However, between November 2016 and mid-2017, before the alarms went off definitively, the way in which he managed the money of these three people changed. “Without their authorization or knowledge, without informing them and circumventing control systems and filters of the banking entity”, the sentence explains, the adviser, who had not “obtained the signature of the clients, decided to change the risk profile from low to very high”.
High-risk and highly complex products
Thus, the private bank employee came to make 1,394 purchase operations of “high-risk and highly complex financial products which, during the year 2017, had a very negative evolution”. His clients, who claimed to have a “low financial formation”, neither gave their consent for their money to be invested there nor did they understand what it was when everything was discovered.
Clients received false information about the status of their investments
In fact, according to their testimonies and the Justice has been able to verify, the adviser, trying to “hide” what he was doing, went so far as to send those three clients false information about the status of your investmentsalthough the Provincial Court has not observed the crime of documentary falsification because they are not commercial documents.
The deception was such that two of the affected clients, who were also partners, found out what had happened when they went to Banco Popular and, when requesting a loan to buy machinery, were informed that they were listed as debtors of 30 million euro.
of the around 1,400 purchase operations that had been made in the name of the three victims, an audit later showed that 98% of them had been made without the client’s signature. However, the expert assured that “it was difficult to have detected him before because you had to go deep into the client’s portfolio” and because “he manipulated the documentation”, so he did not believe that BBVA’s security protocols were deficient.
With 6 million investment he lost more than 44 million
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As detailed in the judicial documentation to which EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA has had access, these almost 1,400 purchase operations caused the “total loss of the balance of the client’s accounts”, but to finance them the employee did not stop there. Using BBVA funds without your consent, continued to operate to try to recover the funds. However, his management turned the initial 6.1 million euros from the three clients into a hole of tens of millions of euros.
At the moment when the internal controls of the bank were aware of what was happening, all those “high-risk and highly complex financial products”, and, even so, the resulting balance was 44.6 million euros of losses. To that, in addition, we had to add the 6.1 million that the bank refunded to customers. A money for which, in addition, the insurer Zurich Insurance has not been responsible at the time of the sentence. To questions from this newspaper, BBVA has preferred not to make statements.