PROTESTS were held across Spain yesterday against a Supreme Court ruling that puts banks “above the law.”

Crowds held “caceroladas,” where demonstrators raise an infernal din by banging pans and cooking utensils, in rallies organised by the left-wing United Podemos coalition, which includes anti-austerity party Podemos as well as the Communist Party-led United Left and others. The biggest rally was held outside the Supreme Court in Madrid.

Podemos politician Pablo Iglesias said a ruling that transfers responsibility for paying fees on legal documents and taxes on mortgages from the lending bank to the client, effectively overruling a law passed by Spain’s Socialist Party-led government that said banks should shoulder those costs, was “an attack on the separation of powers and democracy.”

And Communist MP and United Left co-ordinator Alberto Garzon said courts had bowed to the “unacceptable blackmail of the banks.”

He called for the creation of a public bank, saying private banks had become “the main enemy of democracy” and were “responsible for plundering our economy.”

Mr Iglesias said the government should pass a law recognising that the banks — which were bailed out with public money, like those in Britain, following the 2007-8 financial crash — “owe the Spanish people money, which we have a right to collect.”

Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, including elderly and disabled people, were evicted from their homes by banks due to mortgage defaults after the crash, even while millions of houses in the country lay vacant.