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FRANÇO

Disgraced banker could walk free thanks to Franco fans

A disgraced Spanish banker accused of fraud and embezzlement is out on bail thanks to high-ranking members of the Francisco Franco Foundation.

Published: 15 June 2016 16:11 CEST
Disgraced banker could walk free thanks to Franco fans
Mario Conde could be freed on bail. Photo: AFP

Mario Conde, 67, was arrested in April amid allegations of money laundering a vast fortune embezzled when he was head of Banesto bank.

He was remanded in jail pending an investigation but could be granted release for €300,000 bail to await trial from the comfort of his one of his several homes in Spain. 

It emerged on Wednesday that the financial guarantee has been given by the Alonso Garcia brothers, Jaime Francisco and Jose Angel, who used four properties on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura as a guarantee.

The brothers are high ranking members of the Francisco Franco Foundation, an organization dedicated to the memory of General Franco, the dictator who ran Spain with an iron fist for 40 years until his death in 1975.

A judge must now decide whether to allow release on bail on the condition that Conde handover his passport and report weekly to his local police station. 

Conde, who became a symbol of the “get-rich-quick” culture in Spain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was chairman of Banesto when it was taken over in 1993 after an audit revealed a shortfall of €3.6 billion euros ($4.1 billion).

He was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2002 for embezzlement and fraud but was released on parole in 2005 and declared himself insolvent to avoid paying the compensation ordered by the courts when he was sentenced for his offenses at Banesto.

He was arrested, along with his son, daughter, and her husband in April on suspicion of using front companies to channel some €13m stashed in accounts in the UK, Switzerland and Luxemburg, back to Spain.

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FRANÇO

Spain to exhume bodies of civil war victims at Valley of the Fallen

The Spanish government on Tuesday approved a special fund to exhume graves at the Valley of the Fallen, where thousands of victims of the Spanish Civil War and dictator Francisco Franco are buried.

Published: 31 March 2021 09:30 CEST
Spain to exhume bodies of civil war victims at Valley of the Fallen
Women hold up pictures of their fathers and relatives, who were condemned to death during Franco’s dictatorship. Photo: OSCAR DEL POZO/AFP

The Socialist government said it had set aside €665,000 ($780,000) to exhume some 33,000 victims whose remains lie behind a vast basilica near Madrid.

Franco was buried in the basilica when he died in 1975 but his remains were removed in 2019 and transferred to a discreet family plot on the outskirts of the capital.

Government spokesperson Maria Jesus Montera told reporters that more than 60 families and international institutions had called for the exhumation of the victims to give relatives who suffered during the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship “moral reparation”.

Campaigners estimate more than 100,000 victims from the war and its aftermath remain buried in unmarked graves across Spain —- a figure, according to Amnesty International, only exceeded by Cambodia.

Human remains discovered during exhumation works carried out by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory of Valladolid, in a mass grave where the bodies of hundreds of people were dumped during the Spanish civil war. Photo by CESAR MANSO/AFP

Built between 1940 and 1958 partly by the forced labour of political prisoners, the imposing basilica and the mausoleum of the Valley of the Fallen was initially intended for those who had fought for Franco.

But in 1959 the remains of many Republican opponents were moved there from cemeteries and mass graves across the country without their families being informed.

The crypts and ossuaries where some of the victims are buried are inaccessible as they were walled off at the time.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made the rehabilitation of the victims of the Franco era one of his priorities since coming to power in 2018.

As well as the Valley of the Fallen, his government is also focusing on identifying remains founds in mass graves across Spain.

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