César Alierta

César Alierta (2011)

César Alierta Izuel (born May 5, 1945 in Saragossa ) is a Spanish manager and CEO of Telefónica .

Origin and education

Alierta's father, Cesáreo Alierta, was mayor of Zaragoza under the Franco dictatorship . His brother Mariano is a politician in the conservative People's Party and was a member of the Spanish Senate from 1986 to 2000 .

He studied law at the University of Zaragoza (1967) and earned an MBA from Columbia University in New York in 1970 .

Career

In 1970 he began his career as a financial analyst at Banco Urquijo in Madrid, where he was promoted to division manager. In 1985 he started his own business and founded the securities trading company Beta Capital , which he headed until 1996. In 1991 he became a member of the supervisory board of the Madrid Stock Exchange. He was considered an excellent analyst and stock market expert.

In 1996 the Conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar appointed him President of the then partially state tobacco company Tabacalera . Alierta brought the privatization to a successful conclusion and merged Tabacalera with the French competitor Seita to form Altadis .

In 1997 he and his wife Ana Cristina Placer and his nephew Luis Javier Placer earned 1.86 million euros by buying Tabacalera shares and pseudo-selling a company within a short period of time, and thus came under suspicion of insider trading . They had bought the papers shortly before Tabacalera (since 1999 Altadis ) took over the US cigar company Havatampa , which drove the share price up. The focus of the investigation was the investment company Creaciones Baluarte , founded in May 1997 by Alierta and his wife . After just one month, the company was sold again - to Placer. At that time he was a small analyst at Salomon Brothers in London and was therefore hardly financially able to take over Creaciones Baluarte . He is said to have only served as a frontman for his uncle. Alierta herself denied the allegations. An initial investigation into this deal was unsuccessful in 1998; Resumed investigations fizzled out at the end of 2005 due to the statute of limitations.

Alierta was considered a close confidante of the then Minister of Economics and later Director General of the International Monetary Fund (until 2007), Rodrigo Rato .

When in 2000 his predecessor at Telefónica , the third largest telecommunications company in the world, Juan Villalonga, became intolerable for the conservatives due to his daring manner, Economics Minister Rodrigo Rato made use of the golden share and used the Alierta, which was considered shy and taciturn, but also very efficient the summit. According to José Mario Alvárez Novales, lecturer at the Instituto de Empresa business school in Madrid, Alierta initially knew nothing about the telephone business. However, it was easy for him to get the ailing company back on track. Telefónica had comparatively little debt, was extremely profitable and benefited above all from the mobile communications boom in Latin America, which was already Telefónica's mainstay under Villalonga. Telefónica has around 80 percent of the market shares in its home market and is the market leader almost everywhere in Latin America.

literature

• César Alierta Izuel , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 30/2011 from July 26, 2011, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : César Alierta  - collection of images, videos and audio files