Ángel Ron: the ex-banker of Popular who (for the moment) has evaded prison

Ángel Ron joined the historic Banco Popular in 1984 and left through the back door in 2017, as president of a failed entity bought by Santander for one euro. Under his supervision, what for decades had the reputation of being the soundest bank in Spain ended up being just one more in a long list of financial entities overwhelmed by the years of the financial crisis.

The Galician banker became the sole leader of Popular in 2006, with the resignations of the brothers Luis and Javier Valls Taberner, but he garnered the most headlines with the collapse of Popular. As if the failure were not enough, Ron made a leap into the public imagination in 2017, having secured a pension of 24 million euros, when he took Santander to arbitration – which he lost – over his dismissal, claiming compensation while Popular's shares plummeted on the stock market.

In 2020, the National Securities Market Commission fined Ron and other senior executives of Popular more than one million euros for "omitting data" and "presenting misleading information" in Popular's annual reports between 2013 and 2015. Despite this, the now former banker works normally with his son Carlos and his partner Jorge Gil Lozano at the financial firm Viable Capital Partners. He is awaiting, however, the most important trial for the Popular case, announced for the first half of 2027, when he will sit – with ten other former directors – before the National Court accused of alleged fraud and accounting falsification. If he ends up losing, the sentence could exceed six years in prison, the sentence could exceed six years in prison.