Ana Patricia Botin on Wednesday was named the new chairman of Spanish bank Santander, replacing her father, who died suddenly of a heart attack after nearly 30 years at its helm.
Emilio Botin, a controversial figure who had steered the eurozone’s biggest bank by capitalization through Spain’s financial crisis, died overnight Tuesday aged 79, the bank said in a statement.
The appointment of his daughter, who became the first woman to lead a major bank in Britain when she took over as chief executive of Santander UK in 2011, marks the fourth generation of the family to chair the lender.
Photo: Bloomberg
The board said the Harvard-educated 53-year-old was the “most appropriate person, given her personal and professional qualities, experience, track record in the group and her unanimous recognition, both in Spain and internationally.”
Emilio Botin was one of the most powerful men in Spain, where critics branded him a symbol of excesses in the banking system which sparked a ruinous property crash — although his own bank survived it.
He took over from his father as Santander’s executive chairman in 1986 and expanded it, fusing it over time with entities such as Britain’s Abbey National and others in Latin America.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy paid tribute to Emilio Botin on Wednesday, calling his bank “a great ambassador for brand Spain.”
Emilio Botin’s sudden death, weeks before his 80th birthday on Oct. 1, “was a surprise and a great blow,” Rajoy told reporters at parliament.
Business magazine Forbes estimated the fortune of Emilio Botin— whose surname happens to mean “loot” in Spanish — at 1.1 billion euros (US$1.4 billion).
Emilio Botin was long courted by politicians, but drew howls of anger from protesters in the street amid the crisis that led Spain close to financial collapse and rattled the eurozone in 2012.
Valued at 91.6 billion euros, Santander itself survived the crisis, but Emilio Botin’s image suffered.
Last year, he was summoned to court to testify over Santander’s role in the stock market launch of Bankia — the group whose spectacular collapse and emergency nationalization precipitated the bailout. Previously, he had been cleared in 2005 of embezzlement accusations and in 2012 of alleged tax fraud.
The bank on Wednesday said in a statement that Emilio Botin had died overnight, with a bank spokesman confirming separately that it was due to a heart attack.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by