Former head of Caja Madrid detained Spanish judges this week sent the strongest signal yet that they intend to crack down on former executives at bailed-out banks by putting the ex-president of Caja Madrid into custody in the first detention of a senior financier since the financial crisis began. Amid intensifying anger at a banking crisis that last year forced Spain to accept a European rescue for its lenders, Miguel Blesa, the 65-year-old former head of Caja Madrid, the precursor to the rescued Bankia, will remain in jail ahead of trial until he posts a bail of €2.5m. Mr Blesa's lawyers were on Friday finalising the bail deposit, Spanish media reports said. While the collapse of Bankia, which triggered Spain's largest-ever bank bailout, has prompted repeated street protests and a formal inquiry, the decision by a Madrid court to detain Mr Blesa and confiscate his passport is by far the most serious action taken against a leading Spanish financier since the collapse of Banesto two decades ago. According to the court ruling, Mr Blesa is being investigated because he did not conduct appropriate due diligence when Caja Madrid purchased City National Bank of Florida in 2008, with the $1.1bn acquisition having potentially resulted in losses of at least €500m. He is also being investigated for loans made to a now collapsed Spanish tour operator. On Friday, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Spain's deputy prime minister, said the government would respect the decision of the judge and reiterated the measures taken by Madrid to reform and depoliticise the country's regional savings banks, known as cajas. Other former executives from Spain's once numerous cajas, entities dominated by local politicians that fuelled a decade-long construction binge, have kept low profiles during the crisis, but the majority have continued to live undisturbed by widespread public anger. Rodrigo Rato, the former International Monetary Fund managing director, who took over Caja Madrid from Mr Blesa in 2008 and merged it with six other savings banks to form Bankia, returned to Spanish business less than a year after the bank's rescue by taking an advisory role at Telefónica, the former state telecoms monopoly. Mr Blesa, who enjoyed close ties with the ruling Popular Party, ran Caja Madrid for 13 years up to 2008, when he was ousted by the then PP president of the Madrid region, Esperanza Aguirre, and replaced with Mr Rato. Caja Madrid, the second-largest caja in Spain at the time by assets, then merged with the Valencian savings bank Bancaja, and five other smaller savings banks, before the newly enlarged entity was sold to the public in an ill-fated stock market listing in the summer of 2011. Less than a year later, in May 2012, Mr Rato was forced out of the lender as the Spanish government intervened in the bank in the largest financial rescue in the country's history, all but wiping out hundreds of thousands of small savers and investors who had been sold shares in the listing.