Emilio Botin carried on family tradition in leading Spanish banking

Emilio Botin, who died on Tuesday night, was one of the world's most respected financiers and a man often characterised as the most powerful in Spain.

Born in 1934 in the town of Santander in northern Spain, Botin was always destined to be banker, hailing from a line of financiers. After a Jesuit education, and studying for degrees in law and economics, Botin began a long apprenticeship at Banco Santander, where his father was chairman.

Botin did not need to work. His aristocratic family was already one of the wealthiest in Spain (his full title was Emilio Botin-Sanz de Sautuola y Garcia de los Rios, Marquis Consort of O'Shea).

But the 23-year-old showed an early hunger to excel at banking. His early training prepared the ground for his later success. He gained practical experience as a credit analyst, but also became a consummate networker, with the bank's corporate relationships granting him board seats across Spain.

Botin had to wait until he was 52 for his apprenticeship to finish, taking over from his father as chairman in 1986.

He died only a month short of his 80th birthday - but three years short of his own personal target for running Santander, the bank he built from a midsized local lender into one of the world's biggest. Friends say he always had it in mind to run the lender at least as long as his father, who was 83 when he handed over the reins.

During his 28 years in charge of Santander, he navigated through two significant economic disasters: the 1970s Spanish banking crisis and more recently the 2008 crash and the eurozone turmoil that followed.

As the hands-on patriarch of Spain's biggest bank, Botin had longstanding relationships across Spanish companies and among the country's political elite, as well as the profile and mystique to ensure him vast influence.

The record is not unblemished. Santander's performance in its domestic market suffered badly amid the Spanish housing crisis and there were a handful of legal scandals. But Botin's international expansion helped save the bank from trouble, with a succession of canny deals struck across Latin America and Europe.

There was ruthlessness in the Botin mix, too. When he struck his first meaningful deal in 1999, it was to merge with Spanish rival Central Hispano. Botin - already close to normal retirement age - was supposed to divide power with his opposite number, perhaps stepping down after a year or two. Instead, he quickly seized control, spending a lavish €160m on pay-offs for the top two Central Hispano executives.

Banking was always Botin's first obsession. But he had others: safari trips to Tanzania, where he would hunt big game; and Formula One, where he was a close ally and friend of Spanish driver Fernando Alonso.

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In recent years he became very health-conscious. He exercised religiously, with early morning walks near his home to the northwest of Madrid, and rounds of golf. He also had an increasingly picky diet, involving a lot of egg whites and fruit, boosted with a regular stream of Coca-Cola.

He was active and full of energy to the end, according to friends. But however ardent his ambition to run Santander for several more years, mortality finally caught up with Emilio Botin.

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