Botn's fifth anniversary at Santander, marked by the battle with Orcel

Ana Botn celebrates next Tuesday her fifth anniversary as president of the Santander Bank, marked this time by the legal battle raised this summer by the Italian banker Andrea Orcel, who claims more than 100 million euros after failing last January her signing as CEO .

Ana Botn's career at the head of the bank began unexpectedly after the sudden death of her father, Emilio Botn, at dawn on September 10, 2014, accelerating the end of a process for which he had been preparing all his professional life. Aware that comparisons will soon arrive, From the beginning I looked for my own style and made several very criticized decisions at the time, such as cutting the dividend or making a macroampliacin of capital amounting to 7,500 million euros.

Her first intervention as president of the group was only five days after the death of her father, before an extraordinary shareholders meeting that had been convened in principle only to approve a capital increase to buy 100% of its Brazilian subsidiary, but that I became his official debut. And all Ana Botn sent a message of confidence and assured that the entity's strategy will be "of continuity, the same that has made Santander one of the largest and most successful banks" of the world.

However, the first bombing arrived shortly after its landing in the Financial City of Boadilla del Monte, main headquarters of Santander, at replace the until then CEO, Javier Marn, who had been little more than a year in office, by the financial director, Jos Antonio AlvarezShortly afterwards there will be a deeper renewal of the directive leadership, with the appointment of Jos Garca Cantera, head of Santander Global Banking & Markets and former CEO of Banesto, as a substitute for Jos Antonio Alvarez at the head of the Financial and Relations division with investors.

Then he joined the Rami Aboukhair team, also from Banesto and Santander UK, and on June 30, 2015 he was appointed head of Santander Spain in substitution of Enrique Garca Candelas.

Popular Bank purchase

Another of the great milestones of these years was the purchase of the Banco Popular for one euro after becoming this entity, in the early hours of June 7, 2017, the first to be resolved by the European authorities after weeks of agile burst, "choked "for a real estate portfolio of about 38,000 million euros.

The repurchase of the bank's headquarters, located in the Financial City of Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), one of the great projects of this stage, has had a happy ending, after reaching an agreement with Santander owners, the Reuben brothers , for an undisclosed amount, which includes compensation.

But there have also been scandals, such as the failed signing of Andrea Orcel, which the courts will settle the impossibility of an agreement with the bank, which announced its appointment as CEO in September 2018 and was released four months later, after finding that the signing was going to involve more expenses than initially calculated.

According to Santander, the banker had promised to get UBS to pay part of the "bonus" of 35 million euros owed to him, while Orcel maintains that the Spanish entity failed to comply with a pre-agreement that offered a signing bonus of 17 million euros. euros and a salary of about 10 million a year.

After months of contacts, Orcel broke the negotiations with Santander and went to court to ask for the fulfillment of the contract or compensation of up to 100 million euros for damages and prejudices.

Digitization

Digitization has been another of the tasks to which the entity has dedicated itself more recently in recent years, in which it has invested about 20,000 million euros and has achieved that digital clients add up to almost 35 million, according to the latest data available, from last June.

And as a good banker of the 21st century, Ana Botn also pays special attention to social networks and is quite active on Twitter, where she opened her profile in February 2018, and on Instagram, where she debuted this week with videos and photographs of her trip to Greenland to record a television show with Jess Calleja