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Spain tax officials search home of ex-IMF head Rodrigo Rato

Spanish tax office agents on Thursday searched the Madrid home of Rodrigo Rato, a former IMF head and ex-economy minister with Spain’s ruling conservative party, who has already been charged in two corruption cases.

“The search is being carried out in response to a court order at the request of prosecutors and we can not give more information at the moment,” the spokesman told AFP. He said he could not give the reason for the search.

Spanish media reported that tax officials are looking into the origin of the money which Rato declared when he took advantage of a 2012 government tax amnesty approved by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government.

According to several media outlets, a Spanish judge asked French-American investment bank Lazard for information regarding an alleged payment of 6.2 million euros ($6.6 million) to Rato in 2011 several years after he worked for them as an adviser.

Rato, a former stalwart of Spain’s ruling Popular Party, has already been questioned on suspicion of fraud in an ongoing probe into the stock market launch of bailed-out lender Bankia, which he once chaired.

He is suspected of misrepresenting Bankia’s accounts ahead of its doomed stock market listing and has been charged with fraud, embezzlement and forgery.

Rato has also been questioned in court as part of another probe into alleged spending sprees on company credit cards by him and other ex-managers of Bankia.

He has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

Bankia nearly collapsed in 2012 and had to be bailed out by the Spanish government for 24 billion euros.

Spain later received 41 billion euros from international creditors to protect its whole banking sector from collapse, though it avoided having to get a full sovereign bailout like Greece.

Thousands of customers have brought separate lawsuits against the Bankia group, saying they lost their money after being misled into converting their savings into Bankia shares.

Rato was a finance minister in the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar, which was in office from 1996 to 2004.

He then led the International Monetary Fund from 2004 to 2007, getting the Washington-based job thanks to his reputation for presiding over the early stages of Spain’s construction-led boom.

Rato left the IMF in 2007 for “personal reasons” and was later handed the job of managing Caja Madrid, one of the regional savings banks that fused to form Bankia in 2010.

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