Ricardo Salgado, the former president of Banco Espírito Santo, refused to admit in court that management decisions he made had anything to do with the collapse of the bank and that he has "a deep conviction that he will prove this."
Salgado was in the appeal court in Santarém on Tuesday and said he did not feel the slightest bit guilty about the dire situation in which he left many of his customers.
Salgado continues to blame the Bank of Portugal for his situation, conveniently forgetting the fact that he was caught out concealing over €3 billion in unsecured loans from BES-Angola, the revelation of which led to the collapse of the Portuguese parent bank and triggered the implosion of the entire Espírito Santo Group.
"This is going to have to be figured out here, but I can say that what actually happened after my departure was the collapse caused by the provisions that were mandated by the Bank of Portugal and the auditors and which led the bank to a solvency ratio where it was not possible, in accordance with international rules, to maintain its relationship with the European Central Bank," said Salgado whose self-belief in his own probity is total, while choosing to blame everything on Carlos Costa at the Bank of Portugal.
Salgado was at an appeal hearing over the €4 million fine imposed on him by the Bank of Portugal for selling Espírito Santo International paper to BES clients through BES branches, while fooling them that their money was safely covered by the deposit account guarantee scheme when it was nothing of the sort.
Refusing to admit any liability at all, Salgado said the resolution of BES "was a disaster" an opinion that is believed to be shared by "many people", since "there were provisions that were transferred to Novo Banco that were not used to solve the commitments with the injured."
"When I left the bank, it had more than enough resources to reimburse all those affected and that was what was planned," said the banker whose elaborate game of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ finally was exposed when the business empire collapsed around his ears.
At the appeal hearing, the court also heard testimony from co-Director Amílcar Morais Pires, who was fined €600,000 by the regulator in 2016 for ‘not implementing adequate information and communication systems and not implementing a sound, effective and consistent risk management system with regard to the activity of placing products issued by third parties.’
Pires is appealing his fine, as is Salgado, in the first real test of whether the bankers’ policy of admitting no liability and showing no remorse towards creditors will be one that the court will accept.
