Without the yoke of a debt that ten years ago amounted to 168 million euros and back in professional football, Deportivo is embarking on a path that is expected to be promising under the guidance of the owner of its majority shareholding, who is now also in the front line to be the club’s president. Juan Carlos Escotet, a Spanish-Venezuelan banker at the head of Abanca, is taking over the reins of an entity that he took control of in January 2020. Until now, he was always in the wings, with non-executive presidents and general directors to whom he delegated the day-to-day running of the club while the bank increased its shareholding control and provided capital to offset the disasters caused by the game. Now Escotet finds himself in what Augusto César Lendoiro, Deportivo’s president for a quarter of a century, once called the electric chair.
The Coruña team, one of the nine league champions, came under the control of Abanca in January 2020, which was one of its largest creditors once the debt that led to its bankruptcy in January 2013 was structured. It was from then on that Deportivo and the bank set out to find their own paths and signed different loans that alleviated the financial health of an entity that Tino Fernández had inherited from Lendoiro in a more than precarious condition. Thus, in June 2017, and with the team in the top flight, Abanca lent Deportivo 45 million euros to settle its debt with the Tax Agency, a commitment that cut off the team’s footballing options because it affected its salary cap. A new horizon seemed to be opening up, but the ball did not enter the rival goal and the team collapsed. Three years later, Deportivo was relegated to Segunda B and Abanca, of which Escotet is founder and majority shareholder with 84% of the shares, took control of Deportivo. He will now be its president and his niece, Michelle Clemente, its vice president.
In banking since he was barely a teenager, Escotet turns 65 this month. He was born in Madrid, the son of a man from León and an Asturian woman who lived in Venezuela. He has Spanish nationality and is registered in A Coruña. According to the lists of fortunes, he has the fourth largest fortune in Spain, the third largest in his city, after Amancio Ortega and his daughter Sandra. His figure became familiar in Galicia when eleven years ago, as president of the Venezuelan group Banesco, he led the acquisition of the majority shareholding of Banco Etcheverría, a small and historic entity founded in Betanzos at the beginning of the 18th century. Shortly afterwards, he won the auction that privatized NCG Banco, the last of the Galician savings banks. “It was a bank scarreda patient in intensive care who can now run a marathon,” he said later about the operation. Abanca declared a profit of 711 million euros in 2023 and added more than 130,000 new clients. It is the seventh bank in Spain by volume of assets and maintains an ambitious purchasing policy that points to it climbing that ladder. When he arrived in football just under four years ago, Escotet replicated himself. “I have never seen a company so scarletlike Deportivo”.
So scarredAs things stood, the Deportivo fans are hopeful that the team will follow the path of the bank. But the ball is not as easy to control as the finances. Four years in the catacombs of the third division of Spanish football meant continuous payments to the bank, which did not stop its contributions and has settled a debt of 90 million euros to zero. The day that the women’s team, Depor Abanca, regained its place in the top category of Spanish football, Escotet sat for the first time in the preferential position in the box. His niece, who had been a reserve team player when the project was launched with the board of Tino Fernández, was at his side. She was already a club advisor and the person in charge of day-to-day operations. The afternoon that Lucas Pérez signed with his left foot the return to professional football, Escotet saw him in his VIP box at Riazor, dressed in a vintage shirt. Deportivo is no longer the club that championed popular capitalism, a German-style model in which no one could own more than 1% of the shares. Lendoiro had promoted it in 1992 with the arrival of sports corporations, liquidated it in 2007 when the club was drowning financially and in that inertia it endured for more than a decade between ups and downs and stormy shareholders’ meetings in which anyone who showed up with a couple of shares had the right to speak. Two weeks ago, Deportivo approved that it is necessary to have 1,500 shares to attend these meetings. With a strong owner, and already in the box, the club is beginning a new stage.
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