{"id":135442,"date":"2014-08-07T00:28:38","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T00:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=135442"},"modified":"2014-08-07T00:28:38","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T00:28:38","slug":"financial-crisis-oligarch-scandal-bank-bailout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/money\/financial-crisis-oligarch-scandal-bank-bailout\/","title":{"rendered":"Financial Crisis: The Oligarch, The Scandal And The Bank Bailout"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portugal\u2019s top banker goes down in flames but, asks TOM GILL, will the fire spread to the rest of Europe?<\/p>\n

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R<\/span>icardo Esp\u00c3\u00adrito Santo Silva Salgado is known in Portugal as \u201cDono disto tudo,\u201d or \u201cOwner of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The oligarch\u2019s family has been calling the shots in Portugal for over a century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the largest shareholder of the country\u2019s biggest stock market-listed bank and controls a string of other financial companies, agricultural, energy, healthcare and property companies in Portugal and across the globe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But now it looks like the final chapters in the long history of the most renowned members of the country\u2019s elite are about to be written. And perhaps with it a new chapter in Portugal\u2019s and Europe\u2019s financial and economic crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last month Ricardo Salgado, now aged 70, was arrested. He was detained \u2013 later released on bail for \u00e2\u201a\u00ac3m \u2013 in connection with a long-running investigation into money laundering and tax evasion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Salgado\u2019s arrest didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. The Esp\u00c3\u00adrito Santo family has been under intense scrutiny since earlier this year when an audit ordered by the central bank discovered accounting irregularities at the Luxembourg-registered holding company ESI.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With ESI and its 100 per cent-owned Rioforte now preparing for bankruptcy, the country\u2019s President Anibal Cavaco Silva has admitted that the failure could be systemic. \u201cWe cannot ignore that there will be some impact on the real economy,\u201d he said, providing a rather darker forecast than most of the experts quoted in the press with soothing words such as \u201ccontained\u201d and \u201cpriced-in.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Predictably the central bank has come to the rescue, ejecting Mr Salgado and barring the family from further involvement in the management of Banco Esp\u00c3\u00adrito Santo, and injecting \u00e2\u201a\u00ac4.9bn of public money to shore up the bank group. This is a huge sum in a country that has been through unprecedented austerity as part of a three-year EU and IMF bailout.<\/span><\/p>\n

The repercussions of the crisis go much further than the Esp\u00c3\u00adrito Santo clan \u2013 different branches of which apparently descended into infighting as members used their influence to take out loans, even after regulators in Portugal and Luxembourg started their investigations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Portugal\u2019s top banker goes down in flames but, asks TOM GILL, will the fire spread to the rest of Europe? Ricardo Esp\u00c3\u00adrito Santo Silva Salgado is known in Portugal as \u201cDono disto tudo,\u201d or \u201cOwner of everything.\u201d The oligarch\u2019s family has been calling the shots in Portugal for over a century.\u00a0 It\u2019s the largest shareholder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,52],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-135442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-money"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}