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Francisco Javier de la Rosa (born 1947) is a Spanish lawyer and businessman.
Contents
- Life Details
- Las confesiones de javier de la rosa financiaci n ilegal y pol ticos con maletas de dinero
- Facts
- Early Life
- What Happened to Javier de la Rosa after the Scandal
- References
Life Details
Francisco Javier de la Rosa was born on 29 September 1947 in the region of Àmbit metropolità de Barcelona in the Barcelona Province. He was born in a very humble and marginal family and worked very hard to rise to power. He is famous for many roles - as a Spanish lawyer, broker, businessman and financier.
He was also responsible for embezzling about 500 million - 1 Billion dollars from the Kuwait Investments Office (the KIO group) when he was the administrator in Spain for the group. Even though, according to a few leaked records of 2014, he said that ‘those funds were actually paid to various political parties during the Kuwait war’, it did not spare him prison time.
De la Rosa was the head of the Spanish conglomerate called Grupo Torras during the six years from 1986 to 1992, when the London-based Kuwait Investment Office (KIO) invested $5 billion in Torras. KIO state that as much as $1 billion was stolen, and much of the rest "squandered through egregious mismanagement".
De la Rosa's name has appeared in the leaked Panama Papers.
Las confesiones de javier de la rosa financiaci n ilegal y pol ticos con maletas de dinero
Facts
- Francisco Javier de la Rosa testified before Teresa Palacios, the judge of the National High Court, who made him hand over 20 million pesetas to the Popular Party leadership in 1991 after he corroborated his previous statements.
- Francisco’s daughter Gabriela de la Rosa was mentioned in the Panama Papers for embezzling funds. She was charged in the Pujol case, together with Oleguer Pujol for having received 11.5 million euros as a commission for liaising a transaction for the sale of Banco Santander offices.
- De La Rosa’s father, Antonio de la Rosa organised a money laundering scheme where he embezzled about 1,230 million pesetas from the state treasury. He was unaccounted for this crime for more than twenty years.
- The scandal of the financing of De la Rosa to the Panama Papers blew up when a letter signed by him to Lacalle, thanking him for his contributions, was found.
- In 1995, Francisco Marhuenda, the Chief of Staff, wrote a series of articles defending De la Rosa while he was in prison, to Mariano Rajoy, the Minister for Public Administrations.
- In September 2014, Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, a young CNI agent, recorded a conversation between him and De la Rosa at the Melia Castilla Hotel in Madrid. Iglesias introduced himself as an envoy from the Vice-Presidency of the Government and in turn, Francisco Javier explained to him how banks, involving Banesto, Banco Central and Kuwait Investment Office, paid a large amount of money to the political party Convergences happening at that time. This recorded conversation was confiscated by the police after Iglesias was arrested by the police a month later.
- Sheikh Fahad was De La Rosa’s key defendant in his trial. He denied all links with letters saying that they were computerised signatures of his clients.
Early Life
Francisco Javier de la Rosa studied law and graduated from the University of Barcelona. Later he went for a master's degree in Business Management from IESE Business School in Barcelona. His father, Antonio de la Rosa, was a very eminent businessman and state attorney.
In 1971, Javier de la Rosa was appointed as the assistant director of Banco Pastor, the second oldest banking institution in Spain. In 1976, after winning president Pablo Garnica’s favour, he moved onto being appointed as the general manager of Banco Garriga Nogués, a subsidiary of Banco Española de Crédito (Banesto) in the autonomous community of Catalonia. This was also the time when he was carrying out his operations with the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO).
His stint with financial institutions ended in 1986 when a huge financial scandal was uncovered. Almost 100 billion pesetas were missing from funds, and this information was soon made public. This scandal resulted in the suspension of payments of the KIO Spain group of about 300 billion pesetas (1.8 billion euros).
What Happened to Javier de la Rosa after the Scandal
He was put behind bars when these scandals rose to the public knowledge. In 1992, he was transferred from the Alcalá Meco prison in Madrid, where he shared a module with Mario Conde, to the Model Prison in Barcelona, fearing that he could be killed anytime at the prison. A well timed photograph of De la Rosa eating a sandwich in his cell sparked questions about his safety at the prison. Years later, in 2007, Francisco served his third-degree sentence in Can Brians, Catalonia. Since he was his own attorney, he would sleep in the prison at night and would go out in the morning to prepare his defence in various litigations. After 20 years of constant struggle, in the summer of 2011, he was finally pronounced not guilty and discharged by the Barcelona High Court for the Inland Revenue case.