Cruz Bruner releases the Banco Cartujano internal audit report as a personal act of retaliation that also changes the stakes of the campaign over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The report lays bare how Pencho Gavira tied the church’s proposed redevelopment to a risky bank rescue and his own advancement; Cruz transmits it to every newspaper in Seville, making financial exposure a weapon in the struggle to preserve the church.

Background: the church as a financial asset

The disclosure grows out of a property scheme that had been presented as both profitable and beneficial to the Church. Gavira tells Octavio Machuca that the redevelopment of three thousand square metres in Santa Cruz is the best urban deal Seville has seen since the 1992 Universal Exposition. He links it to the proposed sale of Puerto Targa to Saudi investors for between 180 and 200 million dollars, while insisting that he must avoid paying more than necessary to secure the Archbishop’s cooperation.

The Church’s side of the arrangement is framed in similarly practical terms. Aquilino Corvo says Banco Cartujano would give the diocese generous compensation for the site and fund a new church in one of Seville’s poorest districts, as well as a foundation supporting social work among the Romani community. In return, the plan requires secularizing the church land, removing its parish priest, and demolishing the building. Lorenzo Quart recognizes that this apparent bargain leaves the church’s fate suspended between moral claims, institutional interests, and a major commercial transaction.

The project also carries a specific legal vulnerability. An old family privilege, documented in 1687, sets conditions under which the land donated for the church would revert to the Bruner family. A nineteenth-century law associated with Juan Álvarez Mendizábal’s confiscation of church property complicates that prospect by directing that secularized land revert to the municipality of Seville. A lawsuit by the duchess and her daughter could delay the project, but delay itself threatens Gavira: the scheme is already entangled with investments and commitments, and failure could undermine Machuca’s support for his protégé just as Gavira nears control of the bank.

What the audit exposed

The internal investigation traces the proposed sale of Puerto Targa to a wider pattern of concealed risk. Banco Cartujano had acquired 78 percent of the company after its capital was increased from five million to nine billion pesetas. Puerto Targa was intended to develop a golf course, luxury housing, and a marina in a protected area near Doñana National Park. Although authorities had recently cleared administrative obstacles to construction, the anticipated sale to the Saudi group San Qafer Alley had not gone through.

The audit finds that the bank had continued to accumulate risk while Gavira’s vice-presidency described the exposures as temporary and expected the sale to normalize the situation. Investigators instead uncover deliberately hidden entries, bringing the risks to 20.028 billion pesetas; only 7.020 billion of that total is attributed to Puerto Targa. The report says the company had been financed almost entirely by Banco Cartujano from its inception, through a complicated chain of financial arrangements involving companies based in Gibraltar.

The transaction’s accounting logic is circular. The bank effectively sold Puerto Targa to itself through Gibraltar-based shell companies, then recorded the 7.020-billion-peseta price as income to create a fictitious profit in an earlier balance sheet. A subsequent sale to San Qafer Alley was supposed to generate a further gain and cover a hole of more than 10 billion pesetas. The promised sale—said to be worth about 180 million dollars and repeatedly described as imminent—remained incomplete, leaving the bank exposed rather than rescued.

The report also identifies false accounting, violations of banking rules, expensive efforts to obtain new funds, and a level of risk it calls reckless. It warns that failure of the Puerto Targa sale could cause grave damage to Banco Cartujano and a public scandal among its conservative small shareholders. Its findings concerning Gavira include lavish payments to professionals and private individuals without adequate documentation, payments that in some cases could be considered bribes, and his involvement in business with bank clients. Possible personal profits and commissions are raised but not proven; the report distinguishes those suspicions from the irregularities it says it has detected.

The church redevelopment is therefore not an isolated property deal. The report warns that public knowledge of the bank’s dealings around Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, considered together with Puerto Targa, could alienate the bank’s traditional, often Catholic clientele. Gavira has treated the church project as essential to the larger plan: a luxury hotel in Santa Cruz would help attract the Saudi buyers, while the hoped-for sale could give him the breathing space and credit needed to consolidate his authority at the bank.

Cruz’s decision to publish

Cruz presents the disclosure as an overdue personal reckoning. When Quart asks what she is working on, she calls it a final settling of accounts and clarifies that this time it has nothing to do with Rome. The text on her computer is headed as a confidential internal Banco Cartujano investigation concerning Puerto Targa and other matters. She knows that publishing it will hurt the bank and hurt Gavira much more, and expects that Octavio Machuca may never forgive her.

Her evidence comes from Gavira’s own computer. Cruz says his security key was not difficult to guess, and admits that she obtained access to the internal report there. She regrets that Gavira had once been likeable to her, but sets the conflict in stark terms: it is the church or him. This is not merely an abstract disclosure of corporate wrongdoing. The audit gives documentary form to the financial scheme that made the church’s demolition useful to Gavira and makes the project’s risks visible beyond the private circle of bank officials and church negotiators.

Cruz also refuses to hide behind an intermediary. When Macarena asks whether she intends to tell Machuca, Cruz says she will: she will not throw the stone and conceal her hand. She treats his likely reaction as something he must understand, while dismissing his concern for the bank as negligible. The act is deliberately attributable to her, even as she recognizes that the consequences will reach people and institutions beyond Gavira.

The decisive action is concrete and public. A light flashes on the telephone-line connection; Cruz identifies it as the fax and says she is transmitting the report to all the newspapers in Seville. Her expression hardens as the transmission begins. Macarena has withdrawn and stands looking into empty space, while Quart understands that the document is a direct blow against her former husband. The report does not simply circulate inside the bank: Cruz makes it a matter for the city’s press and, potentially, for the bank’s small shareholders and traditional clientele.

Consequences and aftermath

The narrative does not give a full account of the newspapers’ publication or of any legal proceedings that follow. It does, however, establish later outcomes that place the disclosure within the larger struggle. Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remains open for worship and continues to function as a parish, rather than disappearing under the redevelopment plan.

Gavira’s position at Banco Cartujano does not endure. After Octavio Machuca retires as chairman, a previously unknown figure is appointed to head the board, and a brief economic-news report notes Gavira’s resignation and his renunciation of all executive powers as vice-president and general manager. The account does not state that Cruz’s fax alone caused these changes, but the audit’s exposure of the risks and irregularities makes the eventual loss of Gavira’s authority a consequential counterpoint to his earlier effort to secure it.

Cruz’s action also answers the institutional evasions that had delayed the church dispute. Church officials had treated the property arrangement as a source of compensation and social funding, while Rome had directed Quart to conduct an informational inquiry and maintain strict neutrality. By releasing the bank’s own investigation, Cruz shifts the matter out of those controlled channels and into public view. The disclosure’s significance lies in that change of arena: the church’s threatened demolition is shown to be bound up with accounting practices, corporate power, and Gavira’s political survival, not merely with a local disagreement over a parish site.