Brian Caplen remembers Santander chairman Emilio Botín, who died in September.

In an era when senior bankers have been caught out for not properly understanding their risk exposures, Santander’s legendary chairman Emilio Botín – who died suddenly from a heart attack on September 9 – was a banker of the old-fashioned variety, who regularly ‘kicked the tyres’. 

Risk assessment was a banker’s key talent in Mr Botín’s universe and even as the chairman of the world’s 14th largest bank by Tier 1 capital, according to The Banker’s Top 1000 World Banks ranking – and 98% owned by outside shareholders – he was regularly involved in analysing loans right up until his death at age 79.

In Mr Botín's early days as a banker, risk committee meetings were said to have been held around the dining table at the family home in Santander in northern Spain from where the bank originates.

As the third generation of the Botín family to run the bank, Emilio Botín transformed it from a small regional player into an international bank with major operations in Latin America, Poland, Portugal, the UK, the US and of course Spain. His daughter, Ana Patricia Botín, 53, also a lifelong banker and who has been at the helm of Santander UK since November 2010, has been named as his replacement. She is almost the same age as Mr Botín was when he took over from his father as chairman in 1986.

But sadly Emilio Botín, who was only a month away from his 80th birthday when he died, was unable to achieve his ambition of staying in the post for another three years and retire aged 83 – the same age his father was when he stepped down.

As well as being an accomplished risk manager, Mr Botín was also an inveterate networker with top business and political contacts, right up to presidential level, and a skilled dealmaker who usually came out on top in any negotiation.

An example of the former is shown by his decision to visit Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before he came to power in 2002. At that time, Lula’s left-wing Workers Party had never held the presidency and the Brazilian markets were in turmoil because they feared anti-market policies if the former trade unionist came to power. Mr Botín’s message to Lula was straightforward: if you get elected Santander will work with you.

Mr Botín had good reason to be on terms with a Brazilian president of any political persuasion – Santander bought the former state bank of São Paulo, Banespa, in 2000 and was on its way to becoming the major foreign bank in a Brazilian market noted for occasional fits of patriotic protectionism. The purchase of Banespa had already attracted some of these sentiments.

But Mr Botín could have decided he was too important as the head of a mighty banking empire and with his aristocratic origins (his full title was Emilio Botín-Sanz de Sautuola y García de los Rios, Marquis Consort of O’Shea) to go and consort with an unelected former trade union leader who was born into poverty in the north of Brazil and once worked as a shoe-shine boy and a street vendor.

One of Mr Botín’s talents was to be able to talk to anyone on equal terms whether statesman or pauper. Lula appreciated the gesture and always looked upon Santander as a partner when he eventually won the presidency.

As regards Mr Botín’s negotiating skills, Brazil was also the backdrop for one of his greatest conquests – the purchase of ABN Amro's unit in Brazil, Banco Real, and its Italian subsidiary Banca Antonveneta. The ABN Amro purchase and break-up was done in a consortium with the UK’s Royal Bank of Scotland and Belgium’s Fortis. The deal brought down the other two banks but Santander sold on Antonveneta at a 50% profit to Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena only a few months later. The purchase of Real made Santander the third largest private sector bank in Brazil.

Mr Botín shunned the limelight and rarely gave press interviews. He invited me for breakfast at the bank’s new campus headquarters Santander City on the outskirts of Madrid in late 2012. It was a bleak time for most Spanish banks with a stalled economy, high unemployment and an unresolved property crash.

But Mr Botín was in ebullient mood, emphasising how Santander’s earnings from the international operations offset the downturn in Spain and noting that going forward there would be less competition. It was this savvy ‘glass half full’ approach that drove Mr Botín to build one of Europe’s top banking houses while never taking his eye off that essential risk equation.

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