Sumar filed a complaint before the National Court to demand that the Bank of Spain provide information, bank by bank, on the amount of public money transferred to them in 2022 and 2023 for the deposit of their reserves in the Bank of Spain.
Its spokesman for Economy and Finance, Carlos Martín Urriza, had already announced to the Congress of Deputies in May that the parliamentary group would take the institution to court for not having made public the profits of banking entities through the so-called “deposit facility” system.
In 2023, according to Sumar, the banks thus earned 8 billion euros, which represented 65% of their profits in Spain. As a result, the Bank of Spain recorded losses in its income statement that were offset by provisions. The consequence was that the income of 2 billion million that the Bank of Spain usually achieves each year to the Treasury through its profits was reduced to zero and that, the training emphasizes, this represented a significant decrease in the possibilities of financing public policies.
Specifically, in the last financial year, the Central Bank transferred 7.805 million of public money to Spanish entities for their “cash surpluses”. This remuneration of “parked” liquidity is a consequence of the increase in official interest rates of the ECB from July 2022, but the details of the amount collected by Santander, BBVA or Caixabank are unknown. And knowing this figure is what Sumar’s performance is pursuing.
The registration, he added, represents another step in the process initiated in May by Sumar’s plurinational parliamentary group, which aims to guarantee the fundamental right of access to public information included in the Constitution.
Data Refusal
The lawsuit filed by Sumar explains that this comes after the “material refusal, issued by the Bank of Spain on June 10, 2024, of a request for data, made on May 10, 2024, collecting the amount paid by the Bank of Spain to credit” institutions during the years 2022 and 2023 for the interest paid on their funds deposited in the deposit facility.
Furthermore, that the “response of the Governor of the Bank of Spain”, then Pablo Hernández de Cos, of denying these data requested during a commission in the Congress of Deputies “violated the fundamental right of parliamentarians to obtain information, as provided for in article 23 of the Constitution.
The lawsuit also states that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) specified in a judgment of June 19, 2018 that information that is public or the disclosure of which cannot harm the private interests of the company does not have the character of confidential information. or the proper functioning of the system of supervision of banking activities. Also, according to the case law of the CJEU, the European Central Bank cannot rely on a “general presumption of confidentiality” to refuse access to information related to its supervisory work.
On the other hand, it stresses that the information requested cannot harm, even hypothetically, the private interests of the depositing banks.
Furthermore, he states that “after analyzing the latest reports published by listed Spanish banks, it is found that some of them have voluntarily published, although not standardized, the information requested from the Bank of Spain on the income they receive from the facilities” of deposits at national and European level. ”
For example, it indicates that Bankinter explains that its interest income from deposits with the Bank of Spain has gone from 97.6 million euros in 2022 to 375.3 million euros in 2023; O Caixabank estimates the interest income from deposits in the different Central Banks, which goes from 358 million euros in 2022 to 1,410 million euros in 2023.
