died this Sunday at the age of 74 after suffering a massive stroke on Saturday. The stroke occurred suddenly yesterday without any reason to suspect that he had any previous ailment. In fact, last Friday he had lunch with members of the Basque Businessmen’s Circle, also in the company of José María Álvarez-Pallete, president of Telefónica. And last Thursday he attended the funeral of his colleague and friend Mario Fernández, former vicelendakari and former president of Kutxabank.
Born in Isaba (Navarra), 74 years ago, Echenique was the representative of BBVA on the board of Telefónica, a governing body of which he has been a member since April 2016, the same month in which José María Álvarez-Pallete assumed the presidency of the cluster.
Echenique had a degree in Economics and Actuarial Sciences from the University of the Basque Country, and a professor of Quantitative Social Security Techniques at the Bilbao Faculty of Economic Sciences of the UPV. He was currently a member of the board of directors of Telefónica and the advisory board of Telefónica España, as well as of Telefónica Audiovisual Digital. He was also a director of ACS, Dragados and Calcinor, as well as a member of the McKinsey Advisory Council, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Novia Salcedo Foundation and the Altuna Foundation.
The manager had extensive experience in the financial sector and was linked to the history of BBVA, where he became general director. During his career at the Basque bank he was responsible for the Wholesale Business, in charge of Global Investment Banking, Global Corporate Banking, Business Banking, Government Banking, Local Credit Bank, Asset Management, Banking in Europe, Insurance and Forecasting, E-Business and the Industrial and Real Estate Group.
He therefore had an extensive career as a corporate operations advisor. As a culmination, he was on the management team that led the union in 1999 between the then BBV (which had emerged from the sum of Banco Bilbao and Banco Vizcaya) and Argentaria, led by Francisco González, who ended up as president of BBVA for 19 years. . Echenique left the entity a few years later, in 2001, at the same time as the then co-president Emilio Ybarra and the former CEO Pedro Luis Uriarte.
Among the many positions he held when he left BBVA is that of independent director and vice president of Banco Sabadell, just after the president, Josep Oliu. He joined the Catalan bank in 2010, in the midst of the financial crisis, and was part of the board of directors until September 2022. During this stage the entity tackled its first attempt to merge with BBVA, at the end of 2020, a project that again be on the table, after the Basque entity proposed a new friendly merger to the Catalan entity last spring, which. Echenique left Sabadell in the midst of the bank’s turnaround, after César González-Bueno replaced Jaume Guardiola as CEO.
In addition, Echenique held the presidency of Banco Guipuzcoano, was a director and general director of Allianz-Ercos and a member of companies such as Repsol, ACS Servicios, Comunicaciones y Energía, Grupo Empresarial ENCE, Sevillana de Electricidad, Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, Metrovacesa and Abertis Infraestructuras.
Reactions
The reactions to his death have not been long in coming. Álvarez-Pallete, president of Telefónica, left this message on the businessman and friend. There are many memories of a year that is impossible to forget and of many years in which people like Javier made us better. The people who are closest are always the hardest to say goodbye to. Goodbye, Javier. “A noble man.”
Likewise, the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, has also conveyed his condolences through X. He has indicated that this is a “black weekend” for the Spanish business community, in relation to the death on Saturday of the founder of Isak Andic handle.
