In 1995, he was named an advisor at Caja Madrid, and was sentenced to one year in prison in 2017 for his involvement in a credit card scandal.
Born in Úbeda in the Province of Jaén, Andalusia, Espinar moved to Leganés in the Community of Madrid at the age of 20 in 1975; the commuter town experienced a lot of inwards migration from Andalusia, Extremadura and Castilla–La Mancha at the time.
In 1978, he was told by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) that he would be the candidate for mayor in the first democratic elections the following year.
He was elected as the youngest mayor in the country, holding 14 seats in the city council, ten more than the second-placed Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD).
[4] Espinar left politics in 1995, being named by the PSOE as an advisor to the Caja Madrid savings bank In February 2017, the Audiencia Nacional sentenced him to a year in prison for his part in the "black cards" scandal, in which he used company credit cards to spend €178,400 on personal spending from 1995 to 2010.