hey mate! Just in case you’ve been forwarded this email but would like to subscribe - click the link here.

How The Collapse Of Banco Popular Revealed A Global Catholic Conspiracy

This one is video on Youtube!

You may have seen Paul Bettany’s Silus in the Da-Vinci code, the albino, catholic priest assassin who whipped himself to bed and wore the barbed wire celice across his left thigh…

He plays a fictional character alongside Mance Rayder as members of the catholic cult, Opus Dei.

And while it’s easy to right off a fictional depiction of Opus Dei as imagination, the organisation itself is not - Gareth Gore has 1000’s of pages of sourced documentation which peaks under the hood of a real world secret society, a true metamorphosis from conspiracy to reality. 

Opus Dei are a predatory catholic cult that started in Spain in the early 20th century and grew and grew over the years into a global organisation that set out with the singular vision to re-christianise the entire world. 

They go about this through extremely manipulative recruitment tactics, lobbying the most influential halls of power and although they are not an organisation of assassins like in the Da-Vinci code, they are nonetheless a powerful influence to Vatican politics, US politics, Argentinian politics and anywhere catholicism has cultural influence the world over.

Gareth Gore stumbled into this story when researching and writing the collapse of one of Spains largest financial institutions, Banco Popular, which turns out was the bottomless kitty financing Opus Dei’s international ambitions. It’s a story of money laundering, fraud and financial opacity that made possible the scale of one of if not the most influential and pernicious and influential catholic organisations int he world. But it’s not just a benign organisation that creates a welcoming community for catholics the world over, it is an organisation which has been accused of 100’s if not thousands of incidents of human trafficking, sexual abuse and drug abuse and are attempting to influence their worldview through the rewriting of legal systems. A worldview that reflects the most conservative and man made fundamentalist interpretations of the bible. 

This book by Gareth Gore is an immense achievement that proves an otherwise held conspiracy, of financial fraud at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, political corruption and a secret society exerting their influence on the halls of power that you and I are subject to. 

#184 of ‘The Curious Worldview Podcast’ with Gareth Gore - Spotify

#184 of ‘The Curious Worldview Podcast’ with Gareth Gore - Apple

Or a link to the book here.

Forward this email or share this podcast with a mate who watches a few too many youtube conspiracy videos (myself included).

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
How’d this story get on your radar?

Gareth
Completely by accident. I was not looking to write a book about Opus Dei. In fact, I knew next to nothing about Opus Dei when I came into this. So I'm a financial reporter. I've been covering finance for the past 20 years. And generally, you know, I've covered a wide range of stuff, but generally it's kind of quite esoteric, know, what's going on in the bond markets or this kind of weird, how this weird regulation affects this bank or whatever. But in 2017, a bank in Spain collapsed and I was asked to cover it.

And initially it seemed just like the same old story. I mean, we've had a bunch of banks collapse in Europe and across the world since 2008. And it seemed like the same old story of like, know, basically management had taken too many risks, hadn't stayed on top of what they were doing, and things had just spiraled out of control and the thing had all come crumbling down. So I reported on the bank. That was the story. And that was the story for everyone else as well. And I just left it.

But then two years later, and we'll get onto maybe serendipity later, but through my partner who had a sabbatical at work, she had six months, she's an academic, she had six months to go off and do whatever she wanted to do. And I, as my boss at IFR, whether I might go join her and live in Spain for six months and just work remotely from Spain, still doing my day job. And...

for whatever reason, he said yes. And this is before the pandemic and before remote working became standard. And so when I was there, was like, okay, right, I better start looking for some stories here because, you know, I kind of need to justify being in this other part of the world. I'm gonna look back into that collapsed bank story because I'd seen in the newspapers that some of the investors that were involved in the bank and some of the bondholders, were starting to sue to try to get some of their money back. And so I thought, hey, there's probably an interesting financial story here. I'm gonna, and so I went around, met all of the interested parties. And basically the more I dug, the less sense it all seemed to make. And one kind of glaring thing, which I talk about in the book, is the fact that almost everyone who had lost money seemed to be willing to talk to me. They wanted like the press to cover this story, because they felt very strongly that

banks shouldn't have collapsed and you know that but there was one glaring absence the main shareholder this organization called the syndicates had just disappeared from from view they'd been dissolved as an entity sorry the main company behind the syndicates had been dissolved as an entity and I thought that's a bit odd so I kind of dug a bit more and I kind of got into the history of the bank and I discovered that this bank that had collapsed 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier, it had received all these prizes as like the most profitable bank in the world, like, you know, head of like JP Morgan and Citibank and all this stuff. And I was like, now that's a very interesting narrative. Maybe the story here is how did a, maybe there's a big story here, just a feature story. I wasn't thinking book at this point. Maybe there's a, there's there's a bigger story here of how it is that a bank that was once the most profitable in the world can 20 years on collapse.

Basically, I got into contact with one of the old bosses of the bank who had run this bank, Banco Popular, was called, alongside his brother. These two brothers had run the bank for like 15 years alongside each other. One of the brothers who had died by this stage was called Luis Valls Terradnerd. And he'd been a member of Opus Dei, a numery member of Opus Dei, which means that

It's kind of the inner sanctum of Opus Dei. These are people that dedicate their lives to the movement. They take vows of chastity, poverty, obedience as well. So that was one brother. The other brother was this guy called Javier de Balster-Ardener. He was very different. He was not religious. He was outgoing. He loved good food, good wine. He loved his golf. They were kind of polar opposites. And actually within the bank, there were nicknames.

They were known as Opus Dei and Opus Night. I was, Javier was still around. He was very old, quite sick, but you know, extremely lucid. And he basically told me everything. He basically, you know, I was kind of saying, I came into it saying, you know, asking him how it was that this bank had collapsed, been, you know, gone from this peak to this very deep trough.

And I asked him directly, this syndicate, I can't seem to locate them, I can't seem to find them, what is it? And he basically said, it's Opus Dei. And that set me off on a journey that took me down this very deep, very long rabbit hole, out of which I'm just about emerging now, events keep threatening to drag me back in, people keep getting in touch with new little threads for me to follow and stuff.

whether I get to fully emerge from the rabbit hole or not is yet to be seen.

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.