The unlikely parallel lives of Alan Bond and crooked Spanish banker

What Alan Bond and Jaime Botin had in common, once they had amassed extraordinary wealth, was the need for the world to be aware of it.

Spanish billionaire heir, banker and art collector Jaime Botin.

OBITUARY

Jaime Botin-Sanz de Sautuola y Garcia de los Rios, banker and criminal. Born Santander, Spain, April 10, 1936. Died aged 88 on August 15.

In some ways, wealthy Spanish banker Jaime Botin had little in common with businessman Alan Bond.

Botin had a law degree from the University of Valladolid, which was established in 1241 and is one of the world’s oldest. It was founded by Alfonso VIII, the king of Castile, and its motto remains “Wisdom built a house for itself”.

Its alumni includes leaders of the Spanish judiciary and business, famous thinkers, two prime ministers and even Louis of Granada, the ascetic theologian and Dominican preacher soon to be made a saint.

Bond went to an unremarkable suburban primary school in London that does not list its alumni. That’s handy because, if it had, Bond’s name would have been scratched long ago. On arriving in Australia he attended Fremantle Boys School which, appropriately, had been built by convict labour. The school was later merged to become the John Curtin Senior High School, which does have a list of alumni – topped by AC/DC singer Bon Scott. In any case, Bond did not finish high school, leaving to become a sign-writer.

Botin came from a family of bankers who, after a series of mergers, ran what is known as Banco Santander, a multinational financial services provider and one of the world’s top 20 largest banking institutions. Both his father and brother chaired the Santander Group and at one stage Botin was deputy chairman. It was a privileged life.

Bond became an energetic property developer and it made him wealthy, even if his strategies from the start incorporated lies and stealth, establishing the patterns of a lifetime.

The Botin family’s manoeuvres also were questioned, particularly when they gave uniquely valuable redundancy pay-offs worth $300m to two bank bosses to smooth the way for the creation of their financial leviathan.

Bond was Australian of the Year in 1978, long before he funded the Australia II victory in the America’s Cup that made him a national legend.

Botin kept a lower profile – well, as much as he could as part of one of Spain’s richest families.

What Bond and Botin certainly had in common, once they had amassed extraordinary wealth, was the need for the world to be aware of it.

Bond bought a brewery, the Nine Network, the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong (which he renamed the Bond Centre) and then a stylish superyacht called Adix. With typical flair, Bond renamed it XXXX. Then in 1987 he bought Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, the most expensive painting to come up for auction, for $US53.9m. Many pinpoint the beginning of Bond’s end to that moment of extravagant hubris.

On Black Monday, October 19, that year, world stock exchanges crashed. Courts soon discovered Bond’s colossal thefts and frauds and he served four years in jail. Bond never paid for Irises – he never had the money in the first place – and soon the van Gogh was for sale, as was the inelegantly rechristened XXXX.

Botin bought XXXX from Bond’s receivers, immediately restoring the Adix name. But he’d bought a fancy painting too and it would bring him undone. In 1977 at an art fair in London Botin bid an unpublished, but hefty, sum for the 1906 Pablo Picasso work Head of a Young Woman, an oil painting from what would be known as Picasso’s Rose Period, insured today for about $60m.

With its value rising on the international art market, a trend spawned by Bond’s record purchase, Botin contacted Christie’s auction house in London to sell it. But by then it had been declared a work of national importance by Spain and could not leave the country. Christie’s refused to handle it.

Botin hid the painting on one of his boats and considered hiring a jet to fly it to Switzerland. In 2015 he changed plans, crudely wrapped Picasso’s work in butcher’s paper and loaded it on to the Adix and sent it towards Italy. As the 370-tonne yacht made its way around Corsica, French police, working on a tip-off, intercepted it and found Botin’s pride and joy.

In 2020, Botin was found guilty by Judge Elena Raquel Gonzalez Bayon of smuggling, and sentenced to 18 months jail and fined more than $85m. That was more than twice the value of Head of a Young Woman. Spain’s prosecutor’s office asked the judge to review her sentence. She did and upped the jail time to three years while increasing the fine to more than $150m.