Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011. It is an opinion piece on a news story about letters from José María Ruiz-Mateos (Nueva Rumasa) to Emilio Botín. Nueva Rumasa’s companies went into insolvency proceedings that year; Botín died in 2014 and Ruiz-Mateos in 2015.
As you’ll have seen by now, some letters that Ruiz-Mateos (Nueva Rumasa) sent to Emilio Botín have come to light, and they’ve filled the headlines of online newspapers and blogs. It’s the same old story: chasing the news that sells and dodging the real headline, which is this: who on earth is a bank to make public any communication between a bank and its client, especially when it’s a personal letter?
While I’m not completely sure whether it’s legal to distribute a letter showing a client’s request to a bank, I am absolutely convinced that there has been a tremendous lack of professional ethics.
In this case, since the story is about the battered Nueva Rumasa, it seems anything goes. But if a bank revealed any kind of communication or request from me or my company, I’d be furious.
If the letter was a professional one, Banco Santander has fallen well short. And if it was personal, owing to the old friendship between Emilio Botín and José María Ruiz-Mateos… what friends Ruiz-Mateos picked. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
It’s yet another clear example of how the banks behave: they offered a client a lovely umbrella, and when it started to rain, they weren’t content with taking it away; they had to throw the client into the swamp.
Featured image: Junta Informa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
