Claudio Aguirre has long been one of the most admired
investment bankers in Spain. Now, in the wake of the departure of
Justin Dowley and Huston McCullough, Merrill Lynch's two former
co-heads of European investment banking, Merrill is hoping that he
can extend his reputation across the whole of Europe, the Middle
East and Africa.
When he was 31, Aguirre became the youngest-ever general manager
at Chase Manhattan when he took charge of the bank's Spanish
office. Later, at Goldman Sachs during the late 1980s and early
1990s, he was involved in almost every large Spanish privatization
and M&A transaction. These included the sales of the first
tranches of Spain's three largest state-owned companies, Telefónica
(1989), Repsol (1990) and Endesa (1991).
He has been a similar success at Merrill Lynch, which he joined in
1994. He masterminded the 1996 acquisition of Spain's leading
broker-dealer, FG Inversiones, in...
