Unlikely politician hopes to capitalize on busting Spanish banker

Silva sees himself in the same light. Within the last year, he has rocketed to international fame after being the first Spanish judge brave enough to aggressively investigate and incarcerate a high-level banker. Then Silva plunged just as spectacularly after Madrid’s district attorney’s office charged him with a slew of judicial misconduct offenses — which his supporters consider  politically motivated — that carry sentences of up to 20 years in prison.

The case Silva was chasing is scandalous, as if scripted in Hollywood. An investigation into financial irregularities at one of the largest savings banks quickly spiraled into a controversy over secretive arms trafficking that implicated Spanish bankers and a former prime minister. The case involved a web of connections to a handful of U.S. institutions, including a private bank, a weapons manufacturer and even a former U.S. secretary of defense.

“This was a case that dug and dug until it burst open practically all of the corruption in this system,” Silva said. “And it was a grave theft.”

But perhaps the most compelling story is that of the controversial man behind the scandal, who is emblematic of the divisions of the post-2008 era. To supporters, Silva is one of the nation’s few heroes willing to challenge the entrenched network of political and financial interests that brought the country to the brink of collapse. To his critics, he’s a crusader possessing that timeless fatal flaw hubris. The big question — whether his story will end up being an epic or a tragedy — will likely be determined in May, when Silva will attempt to salvage his career and his reputation during the European Parliament elections.

“The citizens need a political response,” he said.

So on March 10, the lightning rod announced he was working with the upstart pro-democracy movement Renovación Democrática Ciudadana, to form a new political party devoted to rooting out corruption. He would be at its helm, campaigning for a seat in the European Parliament. As the announcement circulated in the media, Silva issued a short call to action.

“If you want to help,” he wrote on Twitter, “send me your telephone number.”

Silva’s saga began May 16, 2013, in a tense courtroom. The judge had called Miguel Blesa to testify as part of an investigation into possible financial crimes committed by the savings bank Caja Madrid during its 2008 acquisition of the private Miami-based City National Bank of Florida (CNBF). Blesa was a powerful man: the former president of the board of Caja Madrid, one of the largest savings banks in Spain, and a close friend of Spain’s former Prime Minister José María Aznar. Blesa and Aznar attended high school together. Blesa, who previously worked for a private weapons manufacturer, had little banking experience before becoming head of the nation’s oldest bank, or caja.

At first, there was nothing extraordinary about that day in court. The Spanish judicial system has opened hundreds of investigations of bankers since the 2008 economic crisis. Blesa had already faced other investigations as well as a slew of allegations of corruption from the right-wing group Manos Limpias. But the day quickly took an unexpected turn. Frustrated with Blesa’s silence in the face of questioning, Silva did what no other judge had done in the five years since the crisis began: He sent a prominent banker to jail.

The story quickly made international headlines and won praise from right and left parties alike.

“I understood that in any country, this would be big news,” Silva said. “But I thought that soon after, everything would go back to normal.”

Instead, the blowback was swift. Within hours, Blesa posted the $2.5 million bail. Within days, he lodged a countercomplaint against the judge, alleging misconduct.

While surprising, the retaliation didn’t faze Silva. He spent most of his childhood living in Latin America because his father was a diplomat. There he was steeped in the histories of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar — men who rose up and revolted against the era’s most powerful empire. Out of these stories, Silva shaped his personal and political identity.

“I was educated in [an atmosphere] of liberty,” he said. Although his politics are far less radical than San Martín’s or Bolívar’s, Silva’s fearlessness nevertheless stands out among judges in Spain — a trait he attributes to the fact that his youth wasn’t clouded by living under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

“I wasn’t educated amid fear,” he said. “I don’t understand this thing of fear.”

The trove of subpoenaed emails documented how Blesa was working with Aznar and a private Spanish defense contractor, Equipos Industriales de Manutencion, S.A., to plot arms deals with Venezuela, Algeria, Russia and Libya. The deals’ legality was, according to international arms experts, questionable. The contractor, which makes military equipment and is better known as EINSA, also happened to be Blesa’s former employer.

EINSA did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the emails, leaked copies of which were later published by the website InfoLibre, the scandal potentially ran deep.

One email from November 2006 documented how Rafael Bardaji, a former national security adviser to Aznar, traveled to Washington, D.C., to represent EINSA in a meeting with the Cohen Group, a Washington-based security consulting firm founded by former U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. The goal was to facilitate a relationship between EINSA and the U.S. defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin. For that service, the Cohen Group proposed a hefty fee: a quarter of a million dollars annually plus 2.5 percent of any resulting contract. This offer was, Bardaji wrote, only “half of what they [the Cohen Group] usually charge.”

Lockheed Martin declined a request to comment.

At 54, Silva has a confident voice and a sleek profile that is often compared to that of Grammy Award–winning musician Miguel Bosé, particularly when the judge removes his glasses. Whether discussing the case or his life, he emphasizes his disposition toward scientific inquiry — though he’s not beyond an exaggeration or two to make a point. In an interview after announcing his campaign for European Parliament, for example, he assured Al Jazeera that Spain’s problems could be cleaned up easily within two years. “Or in a little bit less,” he said.

As for the arms deals, the legality of the global weapons trade is notoriously murky.

“The international law on this question is in incredible flux,” said Barry Kellman, a professor and the director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University College of Law. “It gets very, very difficult to distinguish what kinds of arms transfers are legal from which are illegal.”

When Aznar was helping open Algeria’s and Libya’s markets to EINSA, neither country was subject to multilateral arms embargoes. However, Libya was later (and previously) embargoed by the U.N. Security Council and the EU, in 2011. Meanwhile, EINSA’s 2008 sale of arms to Venezuela did not run afoul of any EU or U.N. Security Council embargoes. But U.S. law is another story. In 2006 the State Department issued an embargo against arms sales to Venezuela as part of the United States’ ongoing effort to isolate the socialist-leaning country.

As a private Spanish company, EINSA is not bound by U.S. arms embargoes. However, security experts say the sale raises questions about the nature of EINSA’s relationship with Lockheed Martin, the productive capacity of EINSA’s U.S. branch and any possible financial relationship with CNBF.

Andrew Feinstein, an arms expert and the author of “The Shadow World,” explained that arms transfers often utilize U.S. dollars at some point in the sale, which often requires a counterpart bank in the United States. Although this U.S. bank usually does little besides earn a nominal fee, once it’s involved, the entire transaction falls under the jurisdiction of U.S. law.

“Essentially, they’ve broken a U.S. arms embargo if any of this went through a U.S. subsidiary or U.S. soil,” Feinstein said.

To Silva, the coincidences were stacking up. Was CNBF purchased to facilitate these deals? Could money have passed through Florida en route to Madrid? But the judge had one big problem: He didn’t have the hard evidence. Even he admits that he is taking a leap to bring it all together.

“Everything exposed is absolutely documented,” Silva said in an encrypted chat. “The only thing not documented is the conclusion: That the bank was not purchased for [traditional] banking business. This is a deduction from all the rest.”

But before he could prove his conclusion, he ran out of time. The complaint by Blesa and his colleagues was taken up by the district attorney’s office of Madrid, which opened a formal case against Silva. He stood accused of prevarication — essentially corrupt or bias application of the law — as well as the crimes of delaying the judicial process and of impinging on Blesa’s freedom when sending the banker to jail.

Together the charges carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

On July 12, the General Council of the Judiciary — the governing body for the Spanish judicial system — temporarily removed Silva from the Blesa case and slapped him with a four-month suspension because of the pending charges. All his files, including the emails, were seized from his office.