Miguel Blesa, the former president of Spanish bank Caja Madrid, was found dead on Wednesday, July 19th, in a garage at a property near Cordoba.
The 69-year-old former chief financial officer was preparing for a day of hunting with a group of friends and was found shortly after eight this morning with a shotgun blast to his chest and a shotgun on the ground - "everything points to suicide," agrees the Spanish press.
The President of this premier Spanish savings bank between 1996 and 2009, Blesa was involved in several legal actions related to corruption and illicit enrichment.
In March 2017, Blesa was sentenced to six years in prison for the so-called ‘black cards’ case.The scandal concerned the use, by several directors of Caja Madrid, of secret credit cards. Personal expenses of hundreds of thousands of euros were never declared to the tax office and the spending continued even when the bank, founded in 1702, was declared bankrupt.
The former minister Rodrigo Rato also was condemned to prison.
Blesa appealed his sentence, as did Rato, and both were freed, pending the result from the Supreme Court.
Blesa was no stranger to prison. He ended up in Soto del Real prison in 2013 due to fraudulent purchase of a bank in Florida. He was released after 15 days, having paid bail of €2.5 million.
Close to the Popular Party, especially to the former president José María Aznar, Miguel Blesa also was being investigated over irregular hikes in executive pay at Caja Madrid.
Blesa also was involved in the preference shares scandal, concerning the fraudulent sale of complex financial products to private investors.
Thinking that it was a safe investment, many clients piled their savings into these assets, eventually losing all their money.
According to family sources, Blesa was "not particularly depressed."
