If confirmed, I will work with the United States Department of the Treasury and the Governments of Andorra and Spain to ensure that actions are carried out in a fair, transparent, and consistent manner.” The author of these words is Benjamin Leon, the new United States Ambassador to Spain and Andorra, and the translation of diplomatic language is that his country is upset with the way authorities in both countries acted in 2015 to liquidate Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) and that in his new posting he will investigate exactly what happened.
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This entity was closed after an alert from FinCen – a US Treasury body that combats criminal financing – allegedly alerted by the Spanish police and the anti-money laundering service of the Ministry of Finance (Sepblac) that there was dirty money in BPA.
The statement is contained in the so-called Questions for the Record (QFR) of the US Senate, consulted by La Vanguardia.
A very high-ranking source in US diplomacy explains that the BPA case is “insignificant” for an American senator “but not that FinCen was used” for other purposes.
The United States is concerned that a crime-fighting mechanism could have been used for different interests or under deception
Thus, a statement of this type implies that the new ambassador, who took office in February in Madrid but has not yet presented his credentials to the co-prince of Andorra, the bishop of La Seu d’Urgell, Josep-Lluís Serrano Pentinat, will take the matter seriously, raised in the US Upper House in October by Senator Bill Hagerty, very close to Donald Trump.
Before taking office, ambassadors are subjected to questions from senators, live or in writing, and the fact that Hagerty raised this issue indicates the extent to which the Trump administration is interested in the matter.
It is the first time that Andorra appears in the QFR.
That the question comes from Hagerty suggests, according to this source, that the Trump administration, in addition to wanting to safeguard the prestige of FinCen and its operational tools, “will not miss the opportunity to pin a dead man on the Obama administration or Spain.”
“Of all the things he could ask, he chose Andorra,” this source states, “and that is not trivial.”
The senator’s question contained the minimum context.
It explained that in March 2015, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the Department of the Treasury issued an advisory of suspicions that BPA was a “financial institution of primary money laundering concern” and proposed a special measure to deactivate it.
The bank’s thesis is that the ‘patriotic police’ inflated or invented cases in revenge for not collaborating by giving them data on pro-independence politicians
Although some BPA clients were prosecuted for the dubious origin of the funds, the four cases that generated the alarm did not have the judicial progress that was expected. But the bank was automatically liquidated, as was its Spanish subsidiary, Banco Madrid.
The key is that the information was allegedly provided to FinCen by the so-called patriotic police, who were looking for data on pro-independence politicians who might have money in Andorra.
Upon not obtaining them, and as revenge, they would have inflated what they knew about some BPA clients.
This is the thesis the bank has maintained ever since to explain the swift action of the American, Spanish, and Andorran authorities.
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FinCen withdrew its note a year later, but BPA no longer existed. The bank’s closure has been dragging on ever since, with dozens of lawsuits under judicial investigation.
In a recording of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo published in 2022, he is heard saying: “We believed that BPA was hiding information about the Pujols; we contacted our American intelligence colleagues and FinCen and sent them reports full of lies; we said that the entity facilitated money laundering for Venezuelan and Russian clients, we scared them, and they acted.”
In 2016, Civil Guard commander Basilio Sánchez Portillo claimed in a judicial statement the credit for having informed FinCen of the presence of the Russian mafia in BPA.
In the judicial investigation in Andorra, the summons of former commissioner Pedro Esteban, mentioned in the trial against the Pujol family in Madrid, has been requested
Sánchez had been denounced by a BPA executive for defining the entity as an “industrial washing machine” for illicit funds.
This Civil Guard officer intervened in Operation Clotilde, which investigated bribes from a Russian businessman (with an account in BPA) to the mayor of Lloret, and which ended with minimal sentences.
In a letter dated April 9, the lawyers of one of the two former owners of BPA, Higini Cierco, and the former chief executive, Joan Pau Miquel, have asked the batlle [judge] investigating the participation of the “patriotic police” in the demise of BPA to request “a copy of all communications sent and received, emails, informative notes, and any other communication” exchanged between the Institut Nacional Andorrà de Finances (INAF) and Sepblac.
The thesis that the liquidation of BPA was due to the intervention of the patriotic police also hovers over the trial against the Pujol family, which continues until May in the Audiencia Nacional, in Madrid.
This case erupted in July 2014, when the newspaper El Mundo published a leak indicating that they had money in Andorra.
The data would have been obtained by agents of that brigade. One of them – the attaché of the Ministry of Interior in Andorra, Celestino Barroso – was recorded by Joan Pau Miquel, threatening him that BPA and Banco Madrid would be eliminated, and that some “Americans” were interested in taking it over, if they did not cooperate. He wanted to know if Jordi Pujol Soley, Artur Mas, and Oriol Junqueras had money in the bank.
On March 11, Barroso testified as a witness in the Pujol trial, explaining that it was commissioner Pedro Esteban – head of the Barcelona information brigade in 2014 – who gave him the order to arrange a meeting in Madrid between Miquel and another agent.
For this reason, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Alfons Clavera, from the Institut de Drets Humans d’Andorra, has requested that Pedro Esteban be summoned as a witness in the case. He also appears in recordings with Villarejo in which the operation against the independence movement is discussed.
After leaving the police, Esteban went on to become head of security at a large banking entity.
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