Notorious Spanish Banker Found Dead With Shotgun Blast To The Chest
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Jul 19, 2017
The former chairman of one of Spain’s largest banks has been found dead with a shotgun blast to the chest in a private hunting estate in southern Spain, the country’s Civil Guard said Wednesday.
According to AP, Miguel Blesa, the former head of the now defunct Caja Madrid savings bank – whose brushes with the law and extravagant hunting trips came to symbolize the excesses of the country’s economic boom – was awaiting the result of an appeal to a six-year prison sentence for misusing corporate credit cards (if not Spiderman towels) issued by the infamous Bankia, another defunct bank.
Witnesses who were with Blesa in the private property near the southern city of Cordoba told police that the former banker left the group early Wednesday morning saying he was going to take his car. They described hearing one gunshot moments later, the Civil Guard spokeswoman said cited by AP adding that an autopsy would be required to determine the exact cause of the death.
The unpopular Blesa chaired Caja Madrid from 1996 to 2010, a period which coincided with Spain’s economic boom, which however was followed by devastating bust.
As Reuters adds, the former chairman and other top Spanish bankers such as former IMF chief Rodrigo Rato, “came to symbolize the disconnection of Spain’s elite from ordinary citizens during the financial crisis, which was marred by one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.”
Leaked pictures to the press of Blesa on exotic hunting trips in 2013, at the height of Spain’s recession, caused uproar as they showed him posing with a rifle next to the corpses of various recently-shot animals, including a bear, a lion, an oryx, a hippopotamus and the heads of two water buffalo.
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