MADRID — Spain’s national court on Monday ordered a criminal inquiry into whether a former governor of the country’s central bank
and seven other regulatory officials knowingly ignored financial problems at Bankia, the giant savings bank whose near collapse prompted Spain’s banking bailout in 2012.
Top officials gave the listing regulatory clearance, the court said, “despite having full and thorough knowledge of the situation in which the entity found itself.” The court did not specify any possible charges
but cited internal emails in which inspectors warned of the risks linked to Bankia’s finances.
After the court’s announcement, the Bank of Spain, the central bank, said three of the eight officials in question
would resign, all of them senior officials in charge of the bank’s supervision and inspection activities.
Bankia is already the subject of several court cases, including a trial over whether the former management, led
by Rodrigo Rato, failed to accurately disclose the status of Bankia’s accounts before the public offering.
A version of this article appears in print on February 14, 2017, on Page B3 of the New York
edition with the headline: Spanish Court Orders Inquiry Into Oversight of Bank I. P.O.
The court said in a statement that there was sufficient evidence to indict the officials in connection
with Bankia’s initial public offering in 2011, a year before the bank’s forced nationalization.