Albino assassins and corporal mortification aren’t topics that come up all that often when you’re a capital markets reporter. Well, not in my experience at least – although perhaps I just wasn’t speaking to the right bankers.
During my first 10 years as a reporter for IFR, I can confidently state that neither subject ever came up. I wrote about football, Saudi princes, debt-ridden UK councils and derivatives. But, for some reason, I never seemed to get stories about radical religious sects.
All that changed in early 2019, when I spent six months reporting from Madrid. Banco Popular, one of the country’s largest banks, had collapsed a couple of years earlier and I had covered its demise, which had been the first real test of Europe’s new post-crisis bank resolution regime, in real time.
By 2019, the bank’s collapse had since become a legal quagmire, spawning more than 100 lawsuits from the bank's 300,000 shareholders and from creditors including Pimco and Anchorage Capital, which claimed that they were owed billions in compensation.
It seemed like a classic IFR story. And so, one by one, I met the disaffected groups. Keen for coverage, everyone seemed eager to talk, or almost everyone; the bank’s largest shareholder, a group that called itself “The Syndicate”, was nowhere to be seen.
Still, my conversations generated a number of stories that proved popular with IFR readers – including one about how the European Central Bank had approved a rights issue even though it knew about financial irregularities, and a deep dive into the rushed resolution of the bank.
More than meets the eye
But there was something about The Syndicate that I just couldn’t let go. The group controlled almost 10% of Popular when it collapsed, worth €1.6bn at its peak. I began to investigate and soon discovered that there was much more to The Syndicate than meets the eye.
At the heart of the consortium was a company obliquely called the European Union of Investors, which resembled a set of Russian dolls. Each doll had an innocent-sounding name: the Fund for Social Action, the Institute for Education and Investigation, the Fund for Social Cooperation, et cetera.
But, as they were unstacked and laid beside each other, curious similarities began to emerge. Many shared the same address and shareholders. They were run by the same group of men. As much as €80m a year was being passed down from the bank and distributed through this network.
Curiously, within weeks of Popular's collapse, EUI – the main company at the heart of The Syndicate – had given notice to authorities that it was to be dissolved. While the bank’s other shareholders were fighting to recoup their money, it seemed intent on quietly exiting the scene.
I returned to London, having failed to get to the bottom of the story. Then I got a new lead: the bank’s former co-chairman Javier Valls-Taberner had agreed to talk to me at his home in the Swiss Alps. I took a few days off work and took the train there. I asked him point blank what EUI was.
“It was Opus Dei one hundred percent,” came the reply.
Albino assassin
I knew next to nothing about the secretive Catholic group – my main reference was The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's novel featuring a self-flagellating albino monk who goes around murdering anyone who comes close to exposing the “secrets” of the church – but its connections to this failed Spanish bank were simply too intriguing for me to ignore.
Fortuitously, the collapse of Popular actually made the next stage of my investigation surprisingly simple. Santander, Spain’s largest bank, had snapped up the failed bank’s assets – including its archives – for a symbolic one euro in the frantic hours following its collapse.
I spent part of my summer holiday in 2021 in northern Spain, sifting through mountains of documents in Popular’s archives and putting my years of financial reporting to good use. I discovered huge cashflows dating back decades: from Popular to Opus Dei.
Around the same time, I noticed some interesting news from Argentina. Forty-two women had filed a complaint alleging that they had been recruited by Opus Dei as young girls and forced to work for years as slaves, cooking, cleaning and scrubbing toilets without pay.
At first, the story seemed unrelated to Popular. But on a subsequent visit to the archives, I discovered a document detailing how the bank had financed a network of schools whose aim seemed to be to recruit young girls into a life of servitude for Opus Dei.
What had begun as an investigation into the mysterious missing shareholder soon took on a very different focus. There was a much bigger story. I decided I should tell it, taking leave from my job at IFR to investigate the story of how this Catholic group had effectively taken over the bank in the 1950s and turned it into its own personal cash machine.
Tip of the iceberg
In early October this year, federal prosecutors in Argentina formally accused Opus Dei of having trafficked teenage girls around the world over five decades. From my reporting, I know this is probably the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of similar schools exist elsewhere – in Africa, Asia and Europe.
Money from Popular was critical not just to financing this network, but also the growth of Opus Dei around the world over the past 70 years. Hundreds of millions of euros – and more likely billions – were syphoned from the bank to finance schools, residences and other initiatives.
This network has been a central feature in enabling the group to achieve its primary goal: recruiting the rich and the powerful, as a stepping stone towards what the group calls in secret internal documents the “re-Christianisation” of society. It has built a phenomenal presence in places like Washington, where it has recruited many powerful Republican Party figures.
My training as a financial journalist – and my time at IFR – have been critical to piecing together the story. It’s a cliche, but following the money led me to the most extraordinary story, and one I would never have expected when writing about Europe’s banking resolution regime.
It’s also a reminder that by watching the huge sums of money we see flashing across our screens every day in the latest bond, loan or equity deal, we can become blind to the people and organisations behind them – and the real world consequences that such financial flows can have.
- Opus by Gareth Gore, published by Simon & Schuster and Scribe, is available now.