MADRID, April 7 (Reuters) - Sabadell will not now face a hefty payment towards bail for eight former executives of now defunct bank CAM after a judge reduced the amount to a fraction of the 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion) originally ordered. The court had said on Wednesday that the eight former executives of savings bank Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo or CAM would stand trial for allegedly concealing the bank’s deteriorating finances during Spain’s banking crisis to keep their bonuses safe. The trial does not yet have a start date. The judge had said that Sabadell, Spain’s fifth biggest bank, would be partly responsible for covering the bail because it had bought CAM in 2011 for a single euro after it was bailed out with 5 billion euros of state funds. But on Thursday, after a petition from Sabadell, Judge Carmen Lamela said the previous bail had been set in error and revised it to 25.6 million euros. A Sabadell spokesman declined to comment. Shares in Sabadell fell as much as 4.8 percent on Thursday on concerns about the impact of the bail payment on the bank. They later recovered some lost ground and were down 2.8 percent by 1556 GMT along with a weaker European banks index $1 = 0.8811 euros Reporting By Angus Berwick and Jesús Aguado; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and Jane Merriman
Banco Sabadell is to avoid a hefty payment towards bail for eight former executives of the now defunct bank CAM following a ruling by a judge reducing the amount to €25.6m ($29m), a fraction of the €1.6bn ($1.8bn) originally ordered. The decision was made in response to an appeal lodged against the original verdict last month and comes after the court ruled that the bail-out fund should not have been used as collateral on loans taken out