Agencies
A Madrid court sentenced ex-IMF chief and Spanish economy minister Rodrigo Rato to more than four years in prison for tax crimes, money laundering and corruption, it said Friday. The sentence comes after the disgraced former heavyweight of Spain’s conservative Popular Party was jailed for four and a half years in 2018 for misusing funds while working at lender Bankia.
Prosecutors had alleged that Rato defrauded the Spanish tax office and lined his own pockets to the tune of 8.5 million euros between 2005 and 2015. Judges found Rato guilty of "three offences against the Treasury, one offence of money laundering and one offence of corruption between individuals”, the court said in a statement. Rato was sentenced to four years, nine months and one day in jail and fined more than two million euros The court added that the "undue delays” in the proceedings, which lasted more than nine years, reduced the sentence. Rato told he would appeal the ruling, which he described as "unfair and lacking in any legal basis”.
He spent eight years variously serving as economy minister and a deputy prime minister in the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar before going on to lead the International Monetary Fund from 2004 to 2007. Rato later headed Spanish lender Bankia, where he misused company credit cards for personal expenses between 2010 and 2012, which earned him the 2018 jail sentence.
He was moved to a semi-open prison regime in late 2020, a decision that came just after he was acquitted in another case of fraud and falsifying the books during the 2011 flotation of Bankia.