Deloitte About to Pay for its Spanish Sins?

Bilked Investors, including the US government, are furious. 

By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.

Spain’s two biggest bankruptcies ever, Bankia (2011-2012) and Abengoa (2015-?), share one thing in common: their auditor.

In both cases, the New York-based big-four firm Deloitte was responsible for making sure the financial statements fairly represent the financial position and performance of the companies, and that they conform to the accounting standards. Turns out, the accounts were as crooked as they come.

Both companies ran aground. Investors in the US and Spain got bilked. The US government got stiffed. And now it seems the auditor may actually end up paying a hefty price for having “seriously” infringed Spain’s account auditing laws.

Zero Independence

In the case of Bankia, Deloitte was not just the bank’s auditor, it was also the consultant responsible for formulating its accounts. As El Mundo puts it, first Deloitte built Bankia’s balances, then it audited them, in complete contravention of the basic concept of auditor independence.

Given this deeply compromising set-up, it’s hardly any surprise that Deloitte (together with Spain’s market regulators) was happy to confirm in Bankia’s IPO prospectus that the newly born franken-bank, which had been assembled from the festering corpses of seven already defunct saving banks, was in sound financial health, having made a handsome profit of €300 million just before its public launch in May 2011. It was a blatant lie: in reality Bankia was bleeding losses from every orifice.

But the lie served its purpose: 360,000 credulous investors were lured into buying shares in the soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. Another 238,000 bought “preferentes” shares or other forms of high-risk subordinate debt instruments being peddled by Bankia’s sales teams as “perfectly safe investments.”

Almost all of those people would end up losing most of their money, as the value of Bankia’s shares nose-dived spectacularly from €3.50 a piece to €0.01. Now, five years later, the bank’s duped investors are finally beginning to claw back some of the money they lost, thanks primarily to the limitless generosity of Spain’s unconsulted taxpayers, who have already stumped up tens of billions of euros to bail Bankia out.

As for Deloitte, it was found by a recent investigation to have ignored at least a dozen glaring errors in Bankia’s accounts. The company had to pay a €12 million fine for “seriously” infringing Spain’s auditing laws, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing to audit the state-owned bank’s books. No, seriously.

Deloitte could end up facing a similar fine for failing to notice a veritable mountain of debt piling up on Spanish energy giant Abengoa’s books during the three years that it served as the firm’s auditor. Deloitte didn’t express any alarm about Abengoa’s financial health until November 13, just two weeks before Abengoa announced that it was seeking preliminary protection from creditors. By that time it was already common knowledge that there were serious problems with the finances of the firm, which is now estimated to have debt of over €8 billion and total liabilities exceeding €25 billion.

As WOLF STREET reported in December, Pepe Baltá, a 17-year old secondary school student in Barcelona who chose Abengoa as the subject of his economics project, noticed serious flaws in the company’s accounting of its mountain of debts — a full year before Deloitte’s handsomely paid auditors blew the whistle!

“The big surprise was that negative profits were being converted into positives,” he told the Spanish daily El Mundo. “I didn’t understand how they could do that.”

Such concerns did not register as important in the minds of Deloitte’s team of auditors. Or perhaps they did, but Deloitte was getting paid handsomely anyway. Why spoil a fruitful relationship?

Blowback Time?

Despite Deloitte’s front-line role in Spain’s two biggest bankruptcies, the firm has suffered little consequence of note. A €12 million fine? Come on! But that could be about to change.

Thanks to new reforms in Europe’s audit regulations, companies will soon have to put their audit work to tender every 10 years. For Deloitte, this will mean losing eight clients from among the pool of 35 companies listed on Spain’s Ibex-35 stock index. Those clients include Spain’s two biggest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA.

Some clients did not even wait for the law to kick into effect before ditching the firm. Last summer, Santander reported that it was swapping Deloitte’s services for PricewaterhouseCooper’s, despite the fact that the banking giant has until 2023 to switch auditors. It’s a massive loss for Deloitte: in the last three years alone, it has billed Santander €260 million for its auditing and consulting services. In January BBVA announced that it, too, was calling quits on its 25-year relationship with Deloitte.

Deloitte has downplayed the bad news, placing its faith in its ability to continue attracting clients for its consulting services. Nonetheless, the toll on its reputation is being felt, with some of the firm’s partners allegedly calling for the resignation of the president of the firm’s Spanish division, Fernando Ruiz.

To rub salt in the wound, the SEC is considering launching its own investigation into Deloitte’s role in Abengoa’s downfall. The U.S. regulator’s interest in the case is perfectly justified: not only is Abengoa’s U.S. subsidiary listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its bankruptcy has left many of its stateside investors high and dry. Chief among them is the U.S. government itself, the company’s biggest creditor, which lent the firm $2.65 billion for two massive infrastructure projects, the Solana solar plant in Arizona and the Mojave Solar Project in California.

Those projects are now at risk of default, along with three other solar and wind farms owned by the company. If Abengoa ends up going into liquidation, rate-payers and/or taxpayers could be left holding the tab. The firm’s creditors and providers would also suffer a big hit.

For Deloitte this could be the beginning of a very ugly headache: by signing off on three years worth of blatantly dodgy accounts in Spain, it could end up attracting the unwanted attention of lawyers and regulators on both sides of the pond. And if Abengoa does fall, Deloitte would end up being the only party left standing that could be made to pay for the Spanish firm’s creative book-keeping. By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit.

As problems in the Spanish banking system continue to fester, there are four things that keep senior bankers awake at night. Read…  Prelude to a Nightmare

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  17 comments for “Deloitte About to Pay for its Spanish Sins?

  1. Chris says:

    This raises the question of criminal actions on the part of Deloitte executives. The specter of corruption and cronyism will rear its ugly head should there be no serious criminal accountability for upper level Deloitte executives.

  2. Bob Miller says:

    Makes me wonder if the Pope is aware of these accounting mistakes? I mean, someone should do something.

    Hellen Keller said, “We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.”

    She was WRONG. What you do is take whatever you want from the peasants without fear. It’s just that easy, the only rule I followed was the rule that Jamie Dimon follows. When money leads, all roads are open.

  3. Jonathan bello says:

    Nick:

    We are also talking about potential criminal fraud and the
    atmosphere created and maintained by the international banks
    of overt human greed.

    Context is important

  4. J P Frogbottom says:

    Anybody smell Arthur Andersen redux?…..or is it just me? Somehow, audit firms get these wild hairs from their “consultancy offerings” which seems in direct opposition to the primary function…. AUDITING!

    Arthur a andersen, the person, stated the investors in firm’s he audited were his real clients. How soon the lesson was forgotten…

    • Dave says:

      JP that’s an easy fix, Arthur Anderson became Accenture and Deloitte can become Descender. Done.

  5. Chicken says:

    Shareholders once again fall victim to the central banker sanctioned insider criminal enterprise that always goes scot-free, unconvicted. Rinse and repeat, this happens again and again, over and over.

    We’re only allowed to see the tip of the corruption iceberg, while being subjected to arms-length list of excuses which always leads down a darkend alley full of financial rapists, muggers and hoodlums.

    “The economy is strong” – POTUS

    • polecat says:

      “the Force is strong in these ones’……….Moss Eisley school of finance

  6. OutLookingIn says:

    Deloitte is a many headed monster. Composed of multi-national member firms, that cannot be found individually liable for the action of any other member or the complex as a whole.

    It is a continuing cesspool of insider info leaks, mismanagement, fraudulent accounting methods, fiduciary failure, conflict of interest, knowingly issuing fraudulent statements, failure to expose frauds, etc.

    @ Nick; The Pope has appointed a former executive of Deloitte as the new head of The Vatican Bank.

    Check wikipedia – Deloitte complaints.

    • Bob Miller says:

      “@ Nick; The Pope has appointed a former executive of Deloitte as the new head of The Vatican Bank.”

      I cannot believe you leaked this. The dividing line between good and evil is an illusion. Ignorance is not bliss – it is oblivion.

  7. walter map says:

    Deloitte should have been sued out of existence years ago, and years before that, and years before that. That it was not only serves to confirm that the financial industry is by far the world’s biggest organized crime syndicate, always has been, always will be.

    Corruption rules, and criminals run the world.

  8. Randy D says:

    Can you spell corruttpsun? Coruppsion coruppsioin high and low, corupssion corrouesion pass the blow. Its friday eve and I need some dough, bill the clients and get more blow.

  9. Randy D says:

    Quijones, great article. Very funny, very provocative. Corruption reigns, it’s trickle down like the money. The government is corrupt and it trickles down to every nook and cranny in the society.

  10. jan frank says:

    In case you wondered why the Spanish Government didn’t notice anything “funny peculiar” have a look at the following

    http://www.thelocal.es/20160212/spanish-civil-servant-takes-6-years-off-work-no-one-notices

    Now I wonder what his exact job was supposed to be. Anything to do with checking what’s happening with Spanish government money?

  11. LG says:

    I did not see Goldman Sachs mentioned?
    I thought they were #1 in the Spanish debt restructuring?

  12. David in Texas says:

    The problem is that the Big 4 accounting firms are also too big to fail. Deloitte deserves to go the way of Arthur Andersen (a firm which truly deserved its fate) but likely will not because the powers that be don’t want to see a world of only 3 big firms.

    Regulations won’t work due to regulatory capture, so the only solution is to reintroduce the discipline of failure and total loss for the partners involved. Break the current Big 4 back into at least 8, so that they can truly fail when they are as derelict in their duties as Deloitte was here.

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