César Alierta

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

Background and education

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

He studied at the University of Zaragoza Law ( completion 1967) and acquired in 1970 at Columbia University in New York an MBA.

Career

In 1970 he began his career as a financial analyst at Banco Urquijo in Madrid, where he rose to Vice President. In 1985 he starts his own business and founded the trading company Beta Capital, which he headed until 1996. In 1991 he became a member of the Supervisory Board of the Stock Exchange of Madrid. He was regarded as an excellent analyst and stock market experts.

1996 appointed the conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar him President of the then still partly state-owned tobacco company Tabacalera. Alierta brought privatization to a successful conclusion and Tabacalera merged with the French competitors Seita to Altadis.

In 1997 he had shared with his wife Ana Cristina Placer and his nephew Luis Javier Placer earned 1.86 million euros with the purchase of Tabacalera shares and the pseudo sale of a business within a short time and fell so under the suspicion of insider trading. They had bought the papers just before Tabacalera (since 1999 Altadis ) U.S. Cigar Group Havatampa took over what drove the share price up. In the center of the investigation, the investment company Creaciones Baluarte, founded in May 1997 by Alierta and his wife stood. After just one month, the company was sold again - and at Placer. This was then a small analyst at Salomon Brothers in London and therefore financially to take hardly able Creaciones Baluarte. He should have served only as a front man for his uncle. Alierta himself dismissed the allegations. A first investigation of this deal was aborted without success in 1998; resumed investigation proceeded end of 2005, probably because of limitation in the sand.

Alierta was a close confidant of the former economy minister and later Director-General of the International Monetary Fund (until 2007), Rodrigo Rato.

When in 2000 his predecessor of Telefónica, the third largest telecommunications company in the world, Juan Villalonga was intolerable by his swashbuckling style for the Conservatives, did Economy Minister Rodrigo Rato of the golden share use and put those regarded as shy and taciturn, but also as a very efficient Alierta to the top. According to José Mario Alvárez Novales, lecturer at the Madrid Business School Instituto de Empresa, Alierta understood at first nothing from the phone business. However, it was easy for him to bring the troubled company back on track. Telefónica had relatively little debt, was extremely profitable, and benefited especially from the mobile boom in Latin America, which was already under Villalonga, the mainstay of Telefónica. In its home market, Telefónica has about 80 percent of the market share and almost everywhere in Latin America, it is the market leader.