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Echegoyen Shakes Up Sareb’s Management Team

14 May 2015 – El Confidencial

The Chairman of Sareb appoints Alfredo Guitart as the new Director General of Global Transformation and does away with three business areas: Transactions, Restructurings and Assets.

Jaime Echegoyen (pictured above, second from right) has got down to business. It has taken just over three months for the Chairman of Sareb, who replaced Belén Romana in the role, to make changes to the entity’s management team. And the changes are not insignificant. In a stroke, the head of the ‘bad bank’ has done away with three business areas, those relating to Transactions, Restructurings and Assets, whose duties will now fall under the new Business team, according to official sources.

Having removed the role of CEO, this organisational restructuring at Sareb turns a ‘man of the house’, the until now Director of Global Transformation, Alfredo Guitart (pictured above, second from left), into the new Director General. In this way, Jaime Echegoyen will depend on a confidant from Belén Romana’s original team, to complete the first round of promotions focused around the areas of Legal Affairs (Oscar García Maceiras – pictured above, right) and Global Resources (Manuel Gómez Gilabert – pictured above, second from left).

These changes take place after Sareb externalised the management of its foreclosed assets to four real estate services (Haya Real Estate, Solvia, Altamira and ServiHabitat). The main person affected by this reorganisation has been Luis Martín Guirado, who has served as the Head of Transactions for less than a year – he joined the ‘bad bank’ in July 2014 from BNP Real Estate, where he was CEO, to replace Juan Barba.

In parallel, Sareb has set up a Direct Management team, which will report directly to the Chairman. This area will be led by Juan Ramón de Díos, who joined the bad bank at the end of January from Barclays, the financial institution where Echegoyen was previously CEO. The new figurehead will address those tasks that the company has decided to manage using its own teams, such as its relationships with large clients, institutional sales and real estate development.

The new director general will be tasked with coordinating and supervising the work performed by the servicers, “as well as the transformation process that these new servicers must undertake to comply with Sareb’s requirements”. For this, the bad bank will have two teams, one for the Network (Marisa González), which will be responsible for driving and monitoring the work performed by the new servicers, and the other for Products and Services (Enrique Martín Barragán), which will set the commercial strategy.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Carlos Hernanz)

Translation: Carmel Drake