Spanish Judge opens Criminal Investigation of Offshore Accounts

On April 9, 2002, the media reported that Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain’s best known criminal judge, had started an investigation into secret funds held offshore by senior executives at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Spain’s second-largest bank. Judge Garzon is investigating potential violations of money laundering, illicit financing of political campaigns and falsifying accounts. The accounts, which were apparently established before 1999, were detected when Francisco Gonzalez, the chairman of the combined bank which resulted from a merger between Banco Bilbao Vizcaya with Argentaria in 1999, hesitated in signing the bank’s 2000 financial statements. He asked that Emilio Ybarra, who apparently had established the accounts and became co-chairman after the merger, inform the Bank of Spain about them. After Gonzalex and Ybarra met and exchanged letters with Jaime Caruanan, the central bank’s governor, concerning the matter, they included 225 millions euros in extraordinary gains dated back to 1986 in the bank’s 2000 reports. As a result, the Bank of Spain started a civil investigation.