The UK-born agitator tapped to shake up Spain’s Telefónica
Marc Murtra’s emergence as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s corporate fixer has drawn accusations of crony capitalism
Quiet entrances are not Marc Murtra’s thing. When the Spanish government abruptly installed him at Telefónica this month after kicking out its executive chair, the opposition leader called Murtra an agent of political “colonialism” furthering Spain’s “anti-democratic drift”.
Such hyperbolic fury is inescapable when you are the favourite corporate agitator of Pedro Sánchez, the divisive socialist prime minister with an interventionist streak.
Murtra has emerged as the premier’s go-to fixer for businesses in need of change. The British-Spanish executive brings a steely politeness to the task — but the results were explosive the first time he was deployed.
In 2021, Sánchez ousted the boss of defence tech group Indra and parachuted in Murtra, triggering accusations of crony capitalism and governance heresy from the right.
Many board members doubted Murtra’s credentials and fought to ensure he had no executive powers as chair. But they got their comeuppance a year later when he helped get five independent directors voted out at a tumultuous shareholder meeting. Another resigned in protest. Last year Murtra finally got some of the executive authority he had coveted.
For a lad born in Blackburn in the north of England, Marc Thomas Murtra Millar has travelled a long way to the crossroads of money and power in Spain.
Valued at €22bn, Telefónica lost roughly half its value during the nine-year tenure of Murtra’s predecessor, who slashed its debt but was short of big ideas. Now the government has other concerns. After Saudi Arabia’s STC said it was building a 10 per cent stake in Telefónica in 2023, Madrid ordered the Spanish state to acquire 10 per cent, while CriteriaCaixa, a friendly private institution, did the same. All three joined forces to install Murtra.
According to former Telefónica executives, two things about the company have long attracted governments: its clout as one of Spain’s biggest advertisers, which translates into media influence, and its control of communications data vital to intelligence agencies. More recently, as the EU battles perceptions of economic decline, some officials see Telefónica as a potential consolidator that could acquire the heft to compete as a European champion, based in Madrid.
But the number of executives to whom Sánchez would entrust it is small. The premier is deeply unpopular with Spain’s mostly conservative business elite, which leaves him with only a small pool of like-minded talent to pick from. That helps explain how leadership of Telefónica fell to the grandson of a local doctor who once practised in the small town of Oswaldtwistle.
Murtra’s mother was an English-Northern Irish nurse who met his father, a heart surgeon from Catalonia, while he was working in the UK. The family moved with him to Spain before Murtra’s first birthday and he grew up in Catalonia, although he spent two years back in Lancashire as a boarder at Stonyhurst, a leading Catholic school.
At home he spoke Catalan to his father, English to his mother and Spanish to his sister, absorbing a natural cosmopolitanism that most executives learn only later in life.
Maurici Lucena, a longtime friend and chair and chief executive of Aena, Spain’s airport operator, described Murtra as an avid student of history and political philosophy who was “calm, order-loving, pleasant” and had “a touch of shyness”.
One senior figure in Spanish business said Murtra was an intelligent and refined navigator of corporate bear pits. “He knows how to get what he wants without being rude.”
As Murtra grew older, he built ties with a circle of business-minded Catalan socialists, people who are proud of their region’s distinct identity but have no desire for it to break away from Spain.
Murtra is close to Salvador Illa, a former Spanish health minister who became Catalonia’s regional president last year and is himself a confidant of Sánchez. Such friendships would help him get where he is today, even though his own ideology is more centrist than some.
“He was always an admirer of Tony Blair, which made him different from others,” said Ignasi Nieto Magaldi, managing director of paper maker Miquel y Costas, who has known him for many years. “He had a very liberal line on economic matters. His stance on non-economic issues was more social democratic than socialist.”
Murtra studied industrial engineering at a university in Barcelona and got an MBA from New York University. After starting his career at British Nuclear Fuels in the UK, he took jobs in Spain in consulting and the public sector, where he led a state agency promoting digitalisation and spent two years as chief of staff to a Spanish industry minister, another Catalan socialist. He switched to the private sector in 2011, setting up Barcelona-based boutique investment bank Crea Inversión, which gave him ample M&A experience.
“Often people say ‘he’s political, he’s just a guy with connections’,” said Nieto. “But I disagree. Aside from all his training, he created a business and it did really well.”
Still, when Murtra was tapped to lead Indra, which is 28 per cent owned by the Spanish state, he was largely unknown. His mission was to convert the company from a radar-centred tech business that happened to serve defence clients into an unabashed defence company that was proud to supply the armed forces. Russia’s assault on Ukraine helped him prevail. But the war of attrition with independent directors who opposed him was painful.
After they were ousted, ultimately by shareholders, the blaze of bad publicity was intense. Rodrigo Buenaventura, then head of Spain’s market regulator, said the episode “demonstrates a way of doing things that should be banished from the practices of Spanish companies”. There was speculation that Murtra would be sacked by Sánchez for not orchestrating events more quietly. But he survived and Indra last year reported the best results in its history.
His next mission? The Spanish government wants Telefónica to be a leading EU tech company, including in AI and cyber security. One route could be a cross-border merger with a rival such as Deutsche Telekom, provided EU antitrust regulators loosen up. Another could be fusing with Spanish satellite group Hispasat or, more outlandishly, with Indra.
No such deal would be easy. But for all his gentle manners, Murtra has shown that when he has orders from above, his single-mindedness can be brutal.
