Europe

Home page

Europe

Protesters occupy Bankia headquarters in Madrid

27 October 2012 02:11 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Members of the Platform of those Affected by Mortgages and 15-M protest group occupied the headquarters of Bankia in Madrid on Friday in an attempt to pressure the bank into stopping evictions, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Around 50 people have been camping out since Monday in front of the Bankia central headquarters in order to stop evictions that according to the Socialist group have so far affected 400,000 families in Spain.

At about 13:00 CET (1100 GMT) on Friday, a group of protesters occupied the Bankia office in Calle Alcala, demanding serious negotiation where they can opt for delay in payment or the payment of rent to allow them to maintain their homes.

Lawyers from the Platform of those Affected by Mortgages say they will not give up the protest until Bankia offers a solution.

Seven judges have just published a report in Spain for the General Council of the Judiciary in which they criticize the old-fashioned current legal basis (from 1909) for evictions and propose several measures to protect families.

Bankia insist they negotiate on a case-by-case basis, saying that 30,000 families in Madrid had not lost their homes because Bankia had changed their mortgage conditions.

Home evictions again hit the headlines in Spain on Thursday after a 53-year-old man committed suicide in the city of Granada when he and his family were on the verge of being evicted from their home. Friday saw another man throw himself from a second floor window just before he and his family were to suffer a similar fate.

BFA-Bankia is the fourth largest bank in Spain and was created in 2010 as a result of a merger between Caja Madrid and other five smaller saving banks, namely Insular de Canarias, Laietana, Avila, Segovia and La Rioja.

On Thursday Bankia informed 72 directors and ex-directors that the 2011 bonus would not be paid despite having been approved by former Bank president Rodrigo Rato.

In 2010 the Spanish government injected 4.465 billion euros (about 5.76 billion U.S. dollars) in Bankia through the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FOBR) and two years later the financial entity requested a 19-billion bailout, which has led to the bank being nationalized, while receiving a total of 23.465 billion euros of public financial aid.

In addition, on Friday the National Stock Market Commission reported that Bankia lost 7.053 billion euros from January to September 2012. (1 euro = 1.29 U.S. dollars)