MADRID, July 20 (Xinhua) -- An autopsy carried out on the body of former Caja Madrid bank president Miguel Blesa on Thursday confirmed the original hypothesis that he had committed suicide.
Blesa's body was found Wednesday morning in the garage of his hunting lodge close to the city of Cordoba in the south of Spain with a bullet wound to the chest. Judicial sources said Thursday's autopsy concluded he had died as the result of "self-injury with a firearm."
There were no further signs of violence on his body. Blesa, 69, had previously asked an employee if he had his wife's telephone number in case anything happened to him.
Blesa, who headed Caja Madrid between 1996 to 2009, was condemned to six years in prison this February for overseeing the use of a fraudulent credit card scheme by bank directors.
The court heard that the total spending on these cards ran up to 12.5 million euros (14.4 million U.S. dollars), over a decade. Blesa himself spent 436,700 euros, much of it to finance a luxurious lifestyle, on his so-called "black" credit card at a time when Spain was in the depths of the economic crisis.
Held up as an example of everything that was wrong with the Spanish banking sector, Blesa was also scheduled to stand trial in a separate case following the mismanagement of Caja Madrid, which merged with five other banks to form Bankia in 2010.
Less than two years after its creation, Bankia needed a massive government bailout of around 20 billion euros in 2012. The bank had been under the presidency of Rodrigo Rato at the time. Rato is also facing a jail term for the use of fraudulent credit cards. (1 euro = 1.15 U.S. dollars)
