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.
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