ValenciaThe general meeting of shareholders of CaixaBank held this Friday in Valencia has agreed to the re-election as CEO of Gonzalo Gortázar, who will continue to lead the entity for another four years. With this decision, the Madrid executive will extend a position he has held since 2014 and which he reached after taking over the general management of Criteria in 2009 and becoming CaixaBank’s finance director two years later.
Gortázar has been in office with three presidents (Isidre Fainé, Jordi Gual and José Ignacio Goirigolzarri) and his main success is the merger with Bankia, which has catapulted the Catalan entity based in Valencia to the status of the first entity Spain During 2023, Gortázar will continue to be the highest paid position in the company with a salary of 2.37 million fixed euros and 954,000 euros in variables. He will be followed by Goirigolzarri, with 1.73 million fixed euros and 336,000 euros in variables. This year, the two top executives will enjoy a 5% salary increase, an increase that the organization has detailed that “goes in line with the average increase in the workforce for the current financial year”.
Another of the board’s agreements was to validate the payment of a dividend of 1,730 million euros – 0.2306 euros per share. The dividend is equivalent to 55% of the 3,145 million euros of profit achieved in 2022.
Although the dividend is an “improvement compared to the previous year”, Gonzalo Gortázar has regretted that “it is still not at the levels set in the strategic plan and that the various investors demand”. “We are confident of achieving the set challenge of exceeding 12% in 2024”, he emphasized. This ambition has collided with the manifestations of the unions who have assured that the workforce lives “a suffocating working climate”. This is what Begoña Peiró, representative of the CaixaBank Employees’ Union, which has stated that this situation has an impact on customers, who “feel mistreated”. For Iván Argüelles, representative of the UGT, the company cannot set “unattainable goals”. a diagnosis not shared by Gortázar, who has shown himself willing to achieve “a good working climate” but not to “slow down the pace”.
Regarding the turbulence in the financial sector, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri has defended that they have occurred in entities “with a situation and business models very different from those of Spanish banking”, which is that of a “strong dispersion of deposits”. He also pointed out that the crisis has shown the need to complete the European banking union. “It would be very important to speed up the creation of the European deposit guarantee fund to avoid an eventual feedback between banking risk and sovereign risk, which, ultimately, was the objective of the Union,” he said.
