From Opus Dei alumni to McKinsey consultants: The clans that run Spain’s biggest companies

An invisible web of connections links the executives and board members of Spain’s largest companies. Having spent time at certain elite consulting firms, business schools or government institutions opens more doors than any headhunter ever could. Former state attorneys sitting on the boards of major Spanish companies, ex-McKinsey executives running some of the financial sector’s most powerful firms, and alumni of leading business schools such as IESE and ICADE holding top positions in multinational companies all illustrate a network of influence, as subtle as it is enduring, that has been woven through Spain’s corporate elite.

“We all know each other here, and when someone comes from McKinsey we already know what will happen,” says an executive at one of Spain’s largest insurers.

McKinsey & Company is a U.S. strategic consultancy founded 100 years ago. Its owners? Its own partners. Unlike other firms such as Accenture, PwC, Deloitte or KPMG, which have a broader range of businesses, McKinsey focuses primarily on advising top executives to launch large-scale projects within organizations: from mergers and acquisitions to entry into new markets.

In the book When McKinsey Comes to Town, journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe explain one of the firm’s most common practices: a large corporation hires the firm for specific assignments, such as improving efficiency, reviewing processes or overseeing procurement projects. Consultants develop close relationships with senior management and, after a few years, some of them are recruited by the client company and recruit other colleagues.

In Spain, McKinsey’s influence is far-reaching. During the Spanish bank BBVA’s attempted takeover of Banco Sabadell, three of the four key players had previously worked for the consulting firm. BBVA Chairman Carlos Torres, Chief Executive Onur Genç and Banco Sabadell CEO César González-Bueno had all been partners at McKinsey.

Throughout the failed bid, many investors questioned the management style of Torres and Genç, attributing it to what they described as the “McKinsey playbook.” “They think they’re smarter than everyone else, but in the end they lack street smarts, they don’t know people well enough, and they dug in with a timid 10% improvement to the offer that failed to tip the balance,” explains a veteran fund manager who oversees more than $110 million in assets.

McKinsey has also had a significant presence at the bank Santander. Until a few months ago, Víctor Matarranz was the right-hand man to CEO Héctor Grisi and also headed the bank’s powerful insurance and asset-management division. He has since moved to the British banking giant HSBC.

The network extends well beyond finance. Fuencisla Clemares, Google’s country manager in Spain, as well as Ignacio Eyries, the new chairman of media group Vocento, publisher of the conservative newspaper ABC, and Sergio Oslé, the recently appointed chairman of media company Mediapro, were also McKinsey partners. Oslé began his tenure by launching a redundancy plan affecting 20% of the workforce. Ignacio Madridejos, the CEO of transport company Ferrovial, also belongs to this circle.

These networks of influence do not exist in isolation. Sometimes they overlap. Madridejos is a case in point. Before joining McKinsey, he studied civil engineering in Madrid, another of the most prolific breeding grounds for Spain’s corporate elite, particularly in the construction sector. Florentino Pérez (chairman of ACS), Manuel Manrique and Juan del Rivero (Sacyr), Juan Miguel Villar Mir (who died in 2024 and founded the Villar Mir group, now OHLA) and José María Entrecanales (founder of the Acciona group, died in 2008) all studied that engineering degree.

“Spain’s major infrastructure has been built by a handful of leading companies founded by civil engineers who were also very successful in internationalizing,” sums up an octogenarian Madrid businessman who worked with many of the engineers mentioned above.

Another engineering pipeline to Spain’s corporate elite is the Institute of Catholic Arts and Industries (ICAI), part of Comillas Pontifical University. The private institution is controlled by the Society of Jesus, the Catholic order better known as the Jesuits, which, alongside Opus Dei, is one of the most influential forces in Spanish education.

At the ICAI engineering school, located on Madrid’s Alberto Aguilera Street, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, chairman of Spain’s energy giant Iberdrola, studied industrial engineering before also earning a business management degree from ICADE, the university’s business school. Other ICAI alumni include Gloria Ortiz, CEO of Bankinter; José Bogas, vice chairman and former chief executive of energy company Endesa; Francisco José Riberas, founder and chairman of auto-parts manufacturer Gestamp; and Amparo Moraleda, chair of the European aerospace group Airbus.

Together, ICAI and Icade boast what is arguably the most extensive and influential alumni network in Spanish business, with more than 50,000 registered graduates. The roster of prominent executives that have passed through the two Jesuit-run institutions is so long that it has its own Wikipedia entry. According to Comillas Pontifical University, the alumni network aims to “facilitate networking, mentoring, access to job opportunities and exclusive events.”

Icade was a pioneer in Spain’s higher-education system, becoming the first university to offer double-degree programs. In 1960, it launched its flagship E-3 program, combining law and business administration. It later extended the model to other degree combinations. The program was so successful that most Spanish universities copied it.

A former ICADE student who now works as an executive at a multinational marketing company acknowledges that the quality of education is “excellent,” but believes there are other reasons so many alumni reach senior management positions. “Networking plays a role, of course, but it also matters that many of the wealthy families from Madrid and nearby areas do everything they can to send their children there.” The executive recalls that “there were many classmates with compound surnames, whose lives you ended up reading about in the society pages of ABC or Hello magazine.”

Ignacio de la Torre, chief economist at investment firm Arcano Partners, questions how influential these contact networks really are. “In executive selection processes, they look for profiles with certain skills who have demonstrated their capacity throughout their careers, and sometimes they come from engineering backgrounds or certain business schools, but reaching those positions isn’t because a university friend pulled strings,” says the economist. “HR departments seek diverse profiles, because it has been shown that only then do you build stronger and more successful teams.”

The Jesuits’ influence extends beyond Comillas Pontifical University. They also run the University of Deusto in Bilbao, a major breeding ground for the Basque Country’s political and business elite, particularly in banking.

Deusto Business School has produced a long list of prominent figures in Spanish finance. Its alumni include José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, former CEO of BBVA and later chairman of Bankia and CaixaBank; Emilio Botín, the longtime Santander chairman who died in 2014 and father of current chair Ana Botín; and Gregorio Villalabeitia, former chairman of Kutxabank. Historic banking figures such as José Ángel Sánchez Asiaín of Banco de Bilbao, Emilio Ybarra of BBV and Pedro Luis Uriarte also emerged from the same institution.

In addition to ICADE and ICAI in Madrid and the University of Deusto in Bilbao, the Jesuits also run the Higher School of Business Administration and Management (ESADE) in Barcelona, which also has a campus in Madrid. Established in 1958 with support from a group of Catalan business leaders, Esade is a postgraduate institution specializing in executive education. Among its alumni are prominent business figures such as Tomás Muniesa, the current chairman of CaixaBank, and Gabriel Escarrer, chairman and CEO of Meliá Hotels International.

That same year, at the height of Spain’s economic-development drive under dictator Francisco Franco, Opus Dei, through the University of Navarra, founded the IESE Business School, another institution focused on executive education. Its first campus was also in Barcelona, but it soon opened a second campus in Madrid’s Aravaca district, on the wooded slopes of Cerro del Águila, near the exclusive Real Club de Campo.

For decades, the Jesuits and Opus Dei have competed to place their business schools among the world’s most prestigious. Both have partnerships with Harvard University and educate thousands of students each year. According to the latest Financial Times rankings, IESE ranks third worldwide for open-enrollment executive programs, while Esade ranks fifth.

Both schools offer programs for senior executives as well as recently graduated students, including the MBA. At IESE, the program currently costs €114,000 ($132,000).

One of IESE’s most influential supporters is Isidro Fainé, chairman of the La Caixa Foundation and one of the most powerful figures in Spanish business. The veteran banker, who is also a member of Opus Dei, studied at Harvard and later completed an executive program at IESE. CaixaBank, along with companies such as Mango and the Basque engineering group Sener, is among the business school’s principal sponsors. Oversight of IESE’s budget, as well as appointments of faculty and governing-board members, falls to the vice chancellor of the University of Navarra, Father Ignacio Barrera Rodríguez, Opus Dei’s regional vicar in Spain.

Andrés Villena Oliver, a professor of applied economics at Madrid’s Complutense University, has spent years studying Spain’s ruling elites. His latest book, Las élites que dominan España (The Elites That Rule Spain), examines these networks of influence. “Business schools, both ESDAE and IESE, are ultimately creations of large industrial groups to train new business generations and continue maintaining power,” he says. In his view, these elite selection models “are a way of filtering candidates so that only similar people access senior roles.”

In addition to strategy consulting firms, engineering schools and Catholic universities, another important pipeline into Spain’s corporate elite is the civil service. One of the clearest examples is the State Attorneys Corps, one of the country’s most prestigious branches of the public administration, whose members are responsible for representing and advising Spain’s central government on legal matters. Of the corps’ 675 lawyers, nearly half are currently on leave from public service, most of them working for major law firms and large corporations.

Moving to the private sector

One of the most common destinations for state attorneys who leave public service is the role of corporate secretary, the executive responsible for overseeing the work and governance of a company’s board of directors. At major Spanish corporations such as Santander, Mapfre and Iberdrola, the person responsible for the functioning of the board is a state attorney. Their influence extends beyond those administrative roles. At ACS, for example, six members of the board of directors have a background as a state attorney.

Their careers in the private sector do not always remain confined to legal advisory roles. Pablo Isla, widely regarded as one of Spain’s most respected corporate executives, former chairman and CEO of Inditex, the parent company of Zara, and now chairman of Nestlé, is a member of the State Attorneys Corps. So is Óscar García Maceiras, who succeeded him as Inditex’s chief executive.

Professor Villena Oliver finds it “to some extent logical” that large companies want these profiles on their governing bodies, as they combine deep knowledge of the state’s legal mechanisms with a powerful network of professional relationships. “The 20 to 25 new state attorneys who enter each year know each other well, and the company that hires them not only gets them but also their valuable contact book,” says the economist.

In his book Los dueños del Estado (The Owners of the State), journalist Rafael Méndez examines the inner workings of this elite group. “The entrance exams are brutal, and it is not easy to pull strings to get someone in. But there are many double-barreled surnames and a certain degree of endogamy,” he explains.

Another branch of the civil service that has served as a breeding ground for politicians and business leaders is the State Trade Corps, an elite body of economists and trade specialists. Known in Spain as tecos, its members have occupied many senior positions within the Economy Ministry and the Bank of Spain. Many have also jumped to the private sector.

One example is José Manuel Campa, a former secretary of state for the economy and former chair of the European Banking Authority, who spent four years as Santander’s global head of regulatory affairs and now teaches at IESE Business School.

The financial sector is probably where these elite networks are most concentrated. Because banking is one of the economy’s most heavily regulated industries, banks have long been attracted to former senior civil servants with regulatory expertise. At the same time, most top banking executives have passed through one of Spain’s leading business schools.

The financial sector is probably the one in which these networks are most heavily concentrated among senior executives. Because it is so highly regulated, banks have tended to recruit former top-ranking public officials into leadership positions. And almost all of their executives have attended a business school.

Another group that played a major role in shaping the Spanish stock market and still maintains a presence today is that of the former agentes de cambio y bolsa (stockbrokers), a regulated profession with similarities to that of notaries public.

Some of them went on to found their own firms. That was the case of Francisco González, who established FG Valores Bursátiles and later became chairman of BBVA.

Another brokerage founded by former stockbrokers was AB Asesores. After the firm was sold to the U.S. bank Morgan Stanley, this network dispersed, with its members turning up across many of Spain’s leading financial institutions, from Bankinter to Mutua Madrileña.

Its most famous partner? A little-known teco named Luis de Guindos, who would go on to head Lehman Brothers in Spain, serve as Spain’s economy minister, and later become vice president of the European Central Bank.

It is another textbook example of the networks of influence, overlapping circles and privileged relationships that help shape economic power in Spain.

The making of elites around the world

The formation of economic and administrative elites follows different patterns from country to country, but in every case it involves a combination of academic achievement, social networks and mechanisms of social selection.

France provides perhaps the clearest example of a system that reproduces elites through specific educational institutions. For decades, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) — which was abolished in 2022 and replaced by the Institut National du Service Public — together with the École Polytechnique, served as the principal breeding grounds for the country’s senior civil servants and corporate leaders. Their classrooms have produced presidents, ministers, top bureaucrats and the leaders of some of France’s largest companies.

What sets the French system apart is the close relationship between the state and big business. Many graduates of these grandes écoles begin their careers in the civil service before moving on to senior positions in industrial, energy and financial groups. Companies such as AXA, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, Carrefour, Orange and Vivendi have all been led by executives trained at these institutions.

This phenomenon has led many sociologists and historians to describe these institutions as a kind of “state nobility” or “bureaucratic nobility”: an elite legitimized by competitive examinations and academic achievement, but one that also occupies a disproportionately large share of positions of power.

Economist and sociologist Andrés Villena considers it “natural” for countries to develop specific pathways to power, describing them as “a tool for ensuring the continuity of the state.” As he notes, “the first to develop such methods of elite selection were the Chinese, with the imperial examination system some 15 centuries ago.”

In the United Kingdom, the logic is different, though power is similarly concentrated. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, collectively known as Oxbridge, continue to play a central role in training the country’s political, legal and business elites. Their influence is reinforced by the longstanding prestige of private schools such as Eton and Winchester, which often serve as a pathway to the country’s most selective universities. Unlike France, where the state occupies a central position, the British model is more closely tied to the weight of finance, the professions and the social networks forged during education.

In Germany, economic elites frequently emerge from technical universities, engineering schools and a highly developed vocational training system. Access to top corporate positions is generally less concentrated in the hands of graduates from a small group of institutions.

The United States has a more open and decentralized system, though it is no less hierarchical for that. Universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and MIT continue to wield considerable influence in Wall Street firms, Silicon Valley technology companies, and major corporations. At the same time, entrepreneurship and geographic mobility make it possible to follow a wider variety of paths to positions of power than is typically the case in Europe.

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