| Reuters
Martinez and his fellow demonstrators are among thousands of Spaniards who say they were conned by banks into exchanging their savings for preference shares: high-risk, complex financial instruments seized on by lenders in the financial crisis as a means of bringing in extra capital.
Many of the banks which issued these products swapped them for shares and bonds. The main state-owned banks such as NGB did not. NGB has apologized and some banks have offered compensation for the worst cases. But now the banks are negotiating with Europe for capital as part of an international bailout, the terms of which will include inflicting a loss on people who in many cases handed over their life-savings.
As the talks take place in Brussels, protests are gathering pace across Spain, both in the north-west region of Galicia - the seat of NGB bank - and in Madrid, where lender Bankia is based and where demonstrators have shown their anger outside the headquarters of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's People's Party.
Lawyers say these people were swindled, and forecast a flood of compensation claims worth hundreds of millions of euros.
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