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.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure