About

Former director of legal for the Central Bank of Spain, Roberto Ugena led many of the bank’s defining projects and transactions during his eight-year tenure. He was part of the Spanish team that negotiated the terms and conditions for the European financial assistance to recapitalise weak banks, part of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Spanish state and the European institutions. ‘According to this MoU, by the end of August 2012, the Spanish authorities, in consultation with the European Commission, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund, had to modify the bank resolution framework in order to provide special tools to resolve banks, such as the sale of business tools and bridge bad banks’ tools and also include provisions on overriding shareholders rights in resolution processes’ he says. ‘We had hardly one month to do that, but we succeeded in producing a bank resolution framework which proved very useful to recapitalise, restructure or resolve the weak banks. I headed the team which was in charge of the first draft of this piece of legislation’. During his time at the helm of Spain’s central bank he designed a key performance indicator system to measure the quality of the input given by the legal department to the operational areas of the bank. As of March 2016, Ugena is the deputy director general of the legal services of the European Central Bank, with responsibilities for all matters pertaining to the supervisory law and legislation divisions.