Spain is a country where people often conflate criticisms of managers with an attack on the institutions they run. This is what the banking sector and the government did when European Commissioner José Manuel Durao Barroso blamed the Bank of Spain, which was being managed by Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez at the time, of not meeting its cash reserve requirement. If it had done so, it could have avoided the brunt of the crisis.
The supervisor won its good image through being transparent, rigorous and distant from political sway in its oversight of the banking sector. The Bank of Spain has been a model institution as of late. Trying to hide the errors that former managers made is the quickest way to repeat those errors and discredit an institution.
