Word: villalonga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Juan Villalonga, the arrangement must have seemed fair enough. Shortly after taking over as head of the Spanish telecommunications firm Telefonica in February 1997, he awarded the company's 100 top executives--including himself--a bushel of potentially lucrative stock options that could be cashed out after three years. With Villalonga at the helm, Telefonica became not only the country's biggest company but also one of its most profitable: it reported a 38% rise in net income for 1999. Protests against the stock scheme by labor unions and leftist politicians did little to rouse the public, in part because...
...does now. Telefonica's market capitalization has doubled to $80 billion on Villalonga's watch, and in February he reaped a $17 million windfall from his options. It put him at the center of a political tempest in the run-up to Spain's elections in March. The left-wing opposition to conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a boyhood friend of Villalonga's, attacked Aznar's coziness with the Telefonica chief and the Prime Minister's tacit approval of the stock-option scheme, which the opposition characterizes as a brazen display of corporate avarice. United Left party leader Francisco...
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