2014_05_23_ECO_Goirigolzarri

The Chairman of Bankia, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, gave the 2014 Rafael Termes Lecture at Amigos Building of the University of Navarra. The event served as the closing ceremony for the students of Degree and postgraduate program of the School of Economics and Business Administration. The economist remarked that "if good corporate governance is core topic for any business, it is even more so for Bankia".

The man who led the preparation of Bankia' s viability plan reminded young economists of the need to "be very realistic", and stressed that without sufficient financial soundness, "the work of a management team is permanently unfocused. It concentrates on the short term deadline and on financial aspects, and not on the long term deadline, on the market and on customers".

Goirigolzarri defended two years ago, in the midst of the debt crisis that gripped the Spanish Economics , the need for 19,000 million of public money to restructure the financial institution. Goirigolzarri acknowledged that his decision "raised a lot of noise, but it was later backed by reality, the stress tests and by the European Commission in our restructuring plan," he stressed.

Bankia's Chairman quoted the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to explain his strategy: "One of the mistakes of past policies had been to try to minimize the capital to be injected into financial institutions, which, in addition to not solving the underlying problems, created great uncertainty and distrust, since in the face of setbacks in the macro status , banks required new capital injections".

"Restructuring completed."

After those difficult beginnings, Goirigolzarri assured that Bankia "now has a solid balance sheet and the restructuring is complete", so it is "halfway to goal of profitability". The work of his team is now focused on "creating value to achieve the return of aid", for which it is necessary to "recognize past mistakes and start again from the beginning".

Goirigolzarri used the example to insist that "the current crisis is an example of putting values above results", and also recommended that future generations should not remain "only in criticism or diagnosis, because if you don't execute you will never know if you are right".