One of BETTER FINANCE’s Spanish Member Organisations, the Association of Minority Shareholders, AEMEC, has been defending minority shareholders in the CaixaBank case since 2016.
Since 2016 they have been following different operations carried out by CaixaBank, in which AEMEC believes the rights of minority shareholders have been infringed.
During 2016, a series of very complex corporate operations took place that, according to AEMEC, have benefited CaixaBank’s largest shareholder Criteria far more than they benefitted the bank’s minority shareholders. These operations included related-party transactions and other transactions with possible conflicts of interest and resulted in equity losses for minority shareholders due to the sale of treasury stock, with the overall final result amounting to a loss for the minority shareholders. In 2018 two minority shareholders filed a lawsuit against CaixaBank and requested an investigation of the aforementioned transactions. This complaint was admitted for processing and resulted in an investigation by a commission looking into possible corporate crimes, including, but not limited to, possible market abuse (insider trading), disloyal administration and false accounts or accounting documents.
Since September 2020, the members of the Board of Directors of CaixaBank have been giving their statements as part of the Abbreviated Procedure before the Central Court of Instruction nº 5 of the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional). AEMEC, along with several minority shareholders, has had the opportunity to appear in this legal procedure and defend the interests of the minority shareholders it represents.
At this stage AEMEC is reaching out to BETTER FINANCE Member Organisations in order to locate international shareholders of CaixaBank who would be interested in joining the aforementioned legal proceedings under the protection of AEMEC. BETTER FINANCE would hereby like to call upon its interested member organisations to disseminate this information about the legal proceedings to their members and put interested minority shareholders directly in touch with AEMEC in order to join in this legal action against CaixaBank.
To this end, AEMEC set up a dedicated email address just for handling registrations from CaixaBank's minority shareholders: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . To contact AEMEC and register with the judicial proceedings, Minority Shareholders of CaixaBank should send an email to the dedicated email address at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and provide the following information:
Surname, First Name
Address
Email address
Phone Number
A Power of Attorney established through a Public Notary (in own language and in Spanish, organised in a double column)
The Apostille of The Hague Agreement
A certificate of ownership of CaixaBank shares proving shareholdership in 2016, up to the present
Thank you in advance for your help.
