Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012, in the middle of Spain’s banking and housing crisis, just before the Rajoy government approved its labour reform in February 2012. Emilio Botín died in September 2014, and his daughter Ana Botín succeeded him as chair of Santander.
Emilio Botín could be a model of how to run a company. After he took over the family bank, which until then had been a small branch, the business never stopped growing, to the point that in 2009, in the middle of the recession, Banco Santander closed the year with profits of €8,940 million. You can read about the beginnings and history of Banco Santander here.
Nobody doubts that Mr Botín is a great businessman; that could never be questioned. But there are two kinds of businessmen, or rather, two kinds of companies: those that make money from the service they provide to their customers, and those that make money by introducing a virus into people’s everyday lives. Emilio Botín has spoken publicly and given his “expert” and biased opinion on the crisis:
“We banks have had little of the blame. The crisis is, for the most part, the politicians’ fault”, said Mr Emilio Botín. (Any politician in particular, Mr Botín?)
I think even the least informed person on economic matters has worked out that we are living through a financial crisis caused exclusively by the financial system. It is also true that the politicians are to blame, mainly because they allowed the banks to endanger the world economy, and they are even more to blame for continuing to grant privileges to the banks and injecting public money to clean up their excesses. I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that there are people in our prisons whose crimes don’t even compare with the damage the banks have done to the planet.
Mr Botín, when I was a child I was taught that when a crime is committed, one clear clue to finding the culprit is to see who has benefited from the robbery or misfortune. If 100 people lose a million euros and someone is looking for the person responsible, one way to find them is to follow the trail of that million euros.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that you agree with the labour reform Mariano Rajoy has in mind, even without knowing exactly what that reform will involve (or perhaps you do know). “They are painful measures in the short term but essential for the future.” Painful for whom? I’m sure it won’t hurt you.
We may have heard that Banco Santander earned 35% less than in 2011. Put that way, making profits of more than 3,000 million euros sounds like a tragedy, so we don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for you.
Your bank is no exception. It is the fourth-largest bank in the world and the largest in Spain, but it is also among the leaders in home repossessions, so you too handed out loans left, right and centre without considering your customers’ long-term ability to pay.
Of course, and this has to be acknowledged, what sets you apart is your intelligence in developing your business model. Not every bank has managed to build a “franchise” system through its official agents, whom you are now getting rid of while keeping their client portfolios without any compensation.
You are not losing money
It is said that large US banks made their biggest fortunes during the Nazi Holocaust, following the old saying: “When there is blood in the streets, buy property.” There is no war right now, although you could say there is blood running in the streets. You only need to look into the eyes of the people who are losing their homes (which you yourself are repossessing) because of a situation that you and others like you created.
You are becoming the biggest real estate company on the planet, although you know as well as I do that you are not losing money. You are making an investment in property assets, and on top of that you have the guarantee that as soon as the person who lost everything has something again, you will go after the debt once more, plus the interest it has accrued.
You will never lose money, whatever happens. In fact, given everything we’ve seen, if I had to invest in a bank right now I would invest in yours, because I know you will maintain your profits at whatever human and moral cost it takes.
Just yesterday I was telling someone that part of the key to being at peace with success is being able to say openly how you achieved it without feeling ashamed. In your case, you probably wouldn’t feel ashamed telling the story, but probably for a different reason.
If I could ask for one thing, it would only be that one day the people directly and indirectly responsible for the damage the economy has suffered are tracked down and put where they belong.
Featured image: Dilma Rousseff from Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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