Alliance & Leicester is the latest rabbit that Emilio Botín has pulled out of his hat as Santander continues its inexorable rise. Botín has now cemented his reputation for being a dealmaker as well as one of the most talented retail bankers in history. What else does he have up his sleeve? Clive Horwood reports.

In 2004 Santander had looked at ABN Amro as an entire business but decided it was not interested in a deal. Botín told his board at the time that the only parts of ABN that Santander might be interested in were its Brazil and Italy operations.

Emilio Botín, chairman of Santander, Euromoney’s Best Bank in the World 2008, passes on some good advice to fellow bankers.

Best global bank 2008

Santander chairman Emilio Botín accepts the award presented to the bank 10 July – watch the video footage

Banco Santander in Brazil has named Banco Real chairman Fabio Barbosa as the new head of the Spanish bank’s businesses in Brazil. Barbosa will take up this new role when Banco Real is legally separated from ABN Amro. Gabriel Jaramillo, the current country head of Santander in Brazil, will "provide advice and support to the office of the chairman of Santander". Jaramillo’s post will be filled temporarily by Jose Paiva until Barbosa takes over the combined operations.

Banco Santander has completed the sale of its Spanish corporate property portfolio through a series of sale-and-leaseback transactions. The deals, executed over seven months, brought more than €4.3 billion into the bank’s coffers, €1.681 billion of which was a capital gain. The sale of the bank’s Madrid headquarters, Boadilla del Monte, to Propinvest was worth €1.9 billion on its own, making it one of the largest deals to be done in Spain.

The bank played a masterstroke by recouping almost half the outlay for its share of ABN Amro before the sale had gone through – and keeping the prized assets.

Daniel Bouton of Société Générale, Baudouin Prot of BNP Paribas, Walter Rothensteiner of Raiffeisen Zentralbank and Alfredo Sáenz of Santander speak about the challenges in the new financial world order.

Vallimarescu eyes opportunities in local markets.

Grupo Santander, winner of Euromoney’s award for best bank in Latin America, has revealed plans to double its Latin American banking business with a $4 billion investment over the next three years. The region is a cash cow for Santander, which realized $787 million of profits in the first quarter, a 47% increase.

Jorge Maortua, deputy head of global wholesale banking for Grupo Santander and the group’s head of treasury services, is running a fast-growing business. Perhaps more important, his division, while finding alternatives to traditional low-margin lending, is building key relationships with the bank’s clients, including small and medium-size enterprises.

Grupo Santander is often considered to be among the sharpest of borrowers, and it certainly has one of the biggest profiles. José Antonio Soler, who has run its funding operation for a year and a half, talks to Alex Chambers about the group’s quest for new pools of capital and its developing issuance strategy.

Search the results Santander’s private banking operation wants to grow its business in Latin America by 20% annually over the next three years

Covered bond issuers are increasingly clear about the merits of solid execution, as Santander's and DexMa's latest deals show.

Santander's retail banking specialists' biggest challenge to date will be to turn around the fortunes of Abbey. Can the Spanish bank's model be successfully applied to the highly competitive UK market?

Santander is one of the most remarkable stories in modern banking. Even the group's highly-ambitious chairman, Emilio Botín, is amazed at how the bank has grown from a small Spanish domestic bank to a place in the global top 10 in just 20 years. He reveals the strategy that has made Santander what it is today.

As it looks to keep pace with rival Banco Santander, Spanish bank BBVA is setting its growth sights on the Hispanic market in the US - at the outset Mexicans in California and Texas - rather than Europe.

As Euromoney goes to press, Santander is set to take over the UK's Abbey National, propelling the Spanish bank into the frontline of European retail banking. But the past won't go away for Santander chairman Emilio Botín. The Spanish courts have ruled that he has serious charges to answer. At the same time minority shareholders who harangue him at Santander's AGM are planning to put their case to Abbey investors in London. Ben Sills reports from Madrid.

Emilio Botín knew that launching a frontal assault on the UK banking market was never going to be a bed of roses. But the 70-year-old chairman of Grupo Santander, Spain's largest bank, and his team were knocked for six by the furore that was unleashed in response to their £8 billion-plus bid for Abbey, the sick man of British banking.

The brainchild of Santander's chairman, Emilio Botín, Santander Group City is set to become Europe's largest corporate headquarters. But not everyone at the bank is happy to embrace a US-style working culture. Jules Stewart reports.

You don't become chairman of Santander Central Hispano, Spain's largest bank, and the undisputed don of Spanish finance, if you're easily flustered. But Emilio Botín is something else. He was quizzed recently by Spanish journalists about how he felt about the 150-year jail sentence he's facing for alleged tax fraud. Serene, he told them.

Banco Santander Central HispanoAmount: £1.3 billionAnnounced: November 29 2002

The continuing success of the bank now known as Santander Central Hispano in growing profit, forging alliances elsewhere in Europe and taking major market shares in Latin America is a tribute to the skills of the two banks that came together to form it. But behind this public face the marriage of two distinct banking cultures has not come easy.

A giant advertisement is being pasted on to a billboard sign along one of Mexico City's urban motorways. In bright red colours, the promotion offers to help change your life.

The Spanish have proved themselves masters of the bank merger. Successfully integrating two differing cultural entities, the merged Banco Santander Central Hispano has within a year become a European force to be reckoned with. Neighbours take note.

The virtual roundtable

This year, Euromoney's Awards for Excellence are broader in scope than ever before. A number of new categories have been introduced to reflect changes in the structure of international markets.