Yesterday, a court in Madrid sentenced the former Director General of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato, to more than 4 years in prison, on charges of committing tax crimes, money laundering, and corruption.
The ruling on Rato – who is considered one of the most prominent figures of the Conservative Popular Party – comes after another sentence of 4 and a half years in prison in 2018 after he was convicted of misusing money while working in a bank.
Prosecutors accused Rato of defrauding the Spanish tax office of about 8.5 million euros between 2005 and 2015.
The court said in a statement that the judges found Rato guilty of “three crimes against the Treasury Department, a money laundering crime, and a corruption crime.”
Rato was sentenced to 4 years, 9 months and one day in prison and a fine of more than two million euros.
The court added that “unjustified delays” in the trial procedures, which lasted more than 9 years, contributed to reducing the sentence.
Rato told the conservative daily ABC that he would appeal the ruling, which he described as “unfair and lacking any legal basis.”
Rato spent 8 years as Minister of Economy, and was Deputy Prime Minister in the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar before being appointed Director General of the International Monetary Fund from 2004 to 2007.
Rato later headed the Spanish bank Bankia, where he misused the bank’s credit cards for personal expenses between 2010 and 2012, leading to his imprisonment in 2018.
In late 2020, he was transferred to a semi-open prison system after he was acquitted in another case related to fraud and forging documents during the flotation of Bankia in 2011 after its collapse in the midst of the financial crisis that struck Spain.
