Carlos Salazar Lomelín stomps on the shareholding of BBVA in the middle of August. In a matter of a few days, the renowned Mexican businessman has become the director of the Spanish bank with the most shares in the entity after multiplying his participation through the heritage company Danford Investments LP. He has come to surpass even the participation in the entity of the president, Carlos Torres.
According to CNMV records, Salazar Lomelín has bought 1.5 million BBVA shares in operations carried out on the New York Stock Exchange in the ADRs of the Spanish firm in that market. The investment has involved a disbursement of about 10 million euros at the current exchange rate and is the equivalent of 0.025% of the bank.
The series of purchases have been made between August 7 and 11, although they have now been known through the Spanish supervisor. The purchase prices oscillate between 7.5 and 7.7 dollars per share, in line with its price at the close of this Monday. It is not the first investment made by the Mexican in 2023.
In February and May, it bought two additional packages that add up to another 684,000 titles in the same US market, raising its stake in BBVA to 0.036% of the capital. According to the bank’s latest corporate governance report, Salazar had his box at zero at the end of 2022, like the majority of the members of the balance board of the two main executives.
A benchmark of the Mexican business community
Salazar Lomelín, 72 years old, has been an external director of the Spanish bank since March 2020, when his first appointment with a 3-year term became official in the midst of a pandemic. Last March he was again proposed to continue occupying a chair on the board until 2026 and was re-elected in the vote of the entity’s Shareholders’ Meeting. His connection to the Spanish bank by far, since he has been a director at Bancomer since 2005, the subsidiary in Mexico, which has consolidated since BBVA bought it in 2000 as the largest bank in the country.
Salazar Lomelín is a businessman with a long history in various sectors, although his main role is linked to management positions around the Monterrey Group, the Garza family and the beverage giant Femsa, which bottles Coca-Cola in Mexico and which sold beer assets to Heineken in 2010 for €3.8 billion.
Key in the Tesla to Nuevo León
His prestige led him to lead the business association Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), a position he maintains and combines with his role as an independent advisor in companies such as the Alsea restaurant group (Grupo Vips). He is also a key figure in the educational world as president of the EGADE Business School business and management school, as well as a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey.
With good contacts in both the US and Mexico, Salazar has held a strategic role in the state of Nuevo León, where he is from, as president of Governor Samuel García’s Strategic Planning Council. Salazar Lomelín teams up here with two other heavyweights such as Blanca Treviño (Softtek) or José Antonio Rivero Larrea (Autlán).
It is a shadow business council that has served, among other things, for Elon Musk to have chosen the state of Nuevo León as the ideal location to build his new gigafactory of automobiles and batteries in the country. The red carpet of the government of Samuel García has dragged to the region part of the auxiliary industry that Tesla needs to get going, in addition to becoming a nerve center for the multinational electric car due to the proximity it will have with the headquarters and production center in Texas.
