20 years is nothing, said Gardel’s tango. Antonio Brufau celebrates this Sunday his twentieth anniversary as president of Repsol at a time of high tension, with the first Spanish oil company leading the sector’s offensive to stop the extension of the extraordinary tax that the Government launched during the energy crisis together with that of banking and which expires in December.
Following the government agreement between PSOE and Sumar, the Executive promised to make permanent what is called in the sector “tax” starting next year, reformulating it and exempting investments in clean technologies. Sources familiar with the process assure that until just a week ago the Executive had negotiated all the tax reform that it must present to Brussels. In fact, it was included in the fiscal plan sent to the European Commission last week. But that negotiation has gone awry and time is of the essence for the Government.
The Ministry of Finance has gained a few days of margin, until October 30, to negotiate with the groups amendments to a bill that must transpose the global minimum rate of Corporate Tax to 15% and that it intends to use to make permanent banking and energy taxes.
The Government faces strong reluctance from two of its key parliamentary supporters, the PNV and Junts, fundamental in two very relevant territories for Repsol due to its industrial weight there, Euskadi and Catalonia. In Tarragona, the multinational has yet to confirm an investment of 1.1 billion euros in a pioneering project to convert urban waste into fuel that it has suggested it may end up taking to Portugal. The future of the tax, in short, is up in the air, acknowledged on Thursday the first vice president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero. And it is foreseeable that, even if it continues in force, it will remain very decaffeinated.
Repsol, aware that the Government does not have this support guaranteed in Congress, has redoubled its pressure campaign in recent days to overturn the tax. In its current conception, it has had a cost of close to 800 million for the oil company: 444 million in 2023 and 335 million in 2024. The company saw how the explosion in crude oil prices caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned its subsidiary into refining company with the highest turnover in Spain in 2022, ahead of Mercadona. It has been the most affected by this “non-tax public property benefit”, which is applied to sales (not profit) and which has been appealed in the National Court like the rest of the sector.
And it has once again unearthed the threat of relocating multimillion-dollar investments. In a very unusual forum published simultaneously in several media, the group’s CEO, Josu Jon Imaz, attacked a few days ago against the “fiscal demagoguery” of the Executive. On Friday, Cepsa joined the choir. The second oil company in Spain, controlled by the emirate of Abu Dhabi, has paralyzed 3,000 million in investment in what is known as the Andalusian hydrogen valley until the Government clarifies whether or not it will maintain, and how, the tax. The day before, the Association of Petroleum Operators (AOP), which represents the entire refining sector, called into question 16 billion investments in Spain until 2030, an effort that “a new tax or lack of clarity about the fiscal horizon could discourage”.
In this war of messages and threats, the leading voice has been Josu Jon Imaz, with Brufau in the background. The one from Mollerusa, who turned 76 in March, is one of the most relevant executives of the Spanish company in the last 25 years. He left his executive responsibilities at the multinational in April 2015, after agreeing a year earlier to separate the positions of president of the board and that of chief executive, which remained in the hands of the former leader of the PNV. A similar maneuver is that of other Ibex colleagues such as the president of Enagás, Antoni Llardén (appointed in 2004, as Brufau, and who stopped being an executive in March 2022) or Josep Oliú (Banco Sabadell), who did so in 2021.
Brufau became president of Repsol at the age of 56. At that time, Spain had been governed for a few months by the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero after the shock of 11-M and José María Aznar’s lies about the Islamist attacks. The Kyoto protocol to combat climate change was in its final ratification phase. Repsol completed the work of extracting the fuel that remained in the wreck of the Prestige, which sank off the Galician coast in November 2002. An environmental disaster with which the oil company had no relationship, and whose cargo it helped to remove “due to its commitment with society and the environment” and at the request of the Spanish Administration, as stated in its annual report that year.
Very different
In 2004, Repsol was very different from today. Its stock market capitalization was about 31.8 billion. It was the most valuable energy company in Spain and one of the largest companies on the Ibex. Today it is the fourteenth company of the selective. It is worth about 14,000 million, far behind Iberdrola (88,000 million) and below Naturgy (22,500 million) or Endesa (about 20,700 million).
Then the oil company had La Caixa as its reference shareholder, key in the appointment of Brufau, general director of that entity from 1999 to 2004. He appointed him a director of Repsol in July 1996 and promoted him to the presidency of Gas Natural (current Naturgy ) between 1997 and 2004. Brufau replaced Pere Duran Farell in the gas company (which then had Repsol as a reference shareholder), the historic businessman who had the vision of designing and launching the gas pipeline between Algeria and Spain.
Graduated in Economic Sciences from the University of Barcelona, Brufau had landed at La Caixa from the auditor Arthur Andersen, the former Deloitte, which went bankrupt with the scandal of the American electricity company Enron in 2002. In this firm (which audited the Repsol accounts until it disappeared) began his professional career and ended up as audit managing partner. The man from Ilerda was considered a man close to the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) when he became president of Repsol to replace Alfonso Cortina, who had been placed as the company’s first executive by his friend Aznar after the company’s privatization.
The one from Mollerusa is one of the Ibex bosses who last year attended the private party that Aznar held at the Teatro Real in Madrid to celebrate his 70th birthday. He has seen them in all colors since his appointment as president of the oil company: he survived Sacyr’s assault on the capital (in 2006), the frustrated entry attempt by the Russian Lukoil (in 2008), the construction company’s clampdown with Mexican Pemex (in 2011) and the traumatic expropriation of the Argentine YPF in 2012. He has remained at Repsol after the departure of the oil company from Naturgy in 2018 and after Caixabank abandoned its shareholding in the oil company in 2019. Today Repsol does not have Spanish shareholders of relevance. The only packages of any weight are those of the giant Blackrock (6%) and Norges Bank (5%).
Brufau also emerged unscathed from his accusation in 2021, along with the president of the La Caixa Banking Foundation, Isidro Fainé, in one of the pieces of the Villarejo case, for the services contracted to the retired commissioner to allegedly spy on Luis del Rivero, then head of Sacyr. The proceedings against the two executives were filed in 2022. During the procedure, a report from Repsol’s own Compliance area pointed to “the intervention of Antonio Brufau in the hiring of Cenyt”, Villarejo’s company.
The president of Repsol was re-elected for the last time at the May 2023 meeting, with a term that will expire in 2027, when he will be 79 years old. In 2019 he pointed to 2023 as the date on which he would leave the presidency, but he ended up staying. In these two decades, he has received from Repsol, for all concepts (salary, shares, pension plan and bonus) about 70 million euros. In 2023, their remuneration was 2.8 million, 34% more. This figure makes him, by far, the highest paid non-executive president of the Ibex, with a remuneration higher than that of many executives. His best year was 2011, just before the expropriation of YPF, when he received 7 million.
Figures that, in any case, pale in comparison to those of, for example, Ignacio Galán, chief executive of Iberdrola, who has pocketed close to 200 million in his 23 years at the head of the Basque company. Galán and Brufau are among the first Ibex swords who have held their positions in the selective for the longest time, along with the president of ACS, Florentino Pérez, Rafael del Pino (Ferrovial), José Manuel Entrecanales (Acciona) and the aforementioned Oliú and Llardén .
Repsol has a strategic plan that sets an investment of between 16,000 and 19,000 million net in four years, allocating more than 35% to low-carbon initiatives. The company, with more than 25,000 employees in 35 countries, is trying to squeeze out its refining business, the lungs of its income statement, although margins in Spain have plummeted in this third quarter by 70% year-on-year due to the fall in crude oil. All this, while growing in green technologies, with prestigious allies such as Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex.
The group closed the first half of the year with 3,118 renewable MW installed, 54.6% more than a year before. It plans to invest between 3,000 and 4,000 million net to organically develop its global portfolio of renewable projects and reach between 9,000 MW and 10,000 MW of installed capacity in 2027. It already has 2.4 million electricity and gas customers in Spain and Portugal. It is the fourth operator in this market in Spain.
The multinational was the first major oil company to set the goal of achieving zero net emissions by 2050. It did so coinciding with the Climate Summit that Madrid hosted at the end of 2019. But, while the International Energy Agency (IEA) proclaimed ago In a few days the arrival of the “age of electricity”, Brufau is responsible for making it very clear in all his public interventions, in which he displays his “pragmatism”, that hydrocarbons will continue to be present, “whether we like it or not.” we like it, for many years.” “In 2100, in the energy matrix, oil and gas – not coal – will continue to be there,” he said in May. He has also denied that Repsol are “retardists or deniers”, in response to criticism from the still Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera.
Very critical of the EU’s energy policy, he has also attacked the objectives set by the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) of Spain. He considers that they are “technologically unfeasible.” He believes that “the leadership to reduce emissions must be applauded, but not at any price.” And he has questioned the ban in Europe on fracking, the so-called hydraulic fracturing, while the continent imports hydrocarbons extracted with this technique in the United States.
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