Carlos Ocaña, co-author with Sánchez of the plagiarized book about his thesis, is the man chosen by the Government to represent the State on the board of directors of Telefónica, as a proprietary director. The State Society of Industrial Participations (SEPI) already has enough of the shareholding to enter with a seat in the highest governing body of the telecom company.
To give it entry, as ABC has learned, the resignation from the Telefónica board – co-optation process – of Carmen García de Andrés, an independent director, occurs and tomorrow the appointment of the State counselor will take place, which must be ratified in the next shareholders meeting, which will be held in 2025.
Ocaña is a figure very close to the Socialist Party, not only because of his editorial link with Pedro Sánchez, but also for having been part of the economic team of La Moncloa with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, later for having worked for Miguel Sebastián in the Ministry of Industry, as well as for having been a director of public companies such as Paradores.
In his career, the most striking thing is the editorial relationship forged with the now President of the Government. Pedro Sanchez He received his doctorate in 2012 with a thesis full of plagiarism, major errors, a rigged tribunal and a long etcetera of academic irregularities, as ABC published in September 2018, after uncovering the academic work that the President of the Government had been hiding for several years. . The name of Carlos Ocaña, who had helped him from the Chief of Staff of the then Minister of Industry Miguel Sebastián, does not appear in the thesis, but it does appear in the book based on the thesis and with a title of the same name, ‘The new economic diplomacy’. Registered in 2013 and published in 2014 in the Delta publishing house, Pedro Sánchez signs it as director and Carlos Ocaña as co-author. And if the thesis violated countless standards of academic integrity, the book went further, at least as far as plagiarism is concerned.
As this newspaper confirmed with documentary evidence, Sánchez and Ocaña plagiarized a minimum of 161 lines in their book. These are complete paragraphs without quotes or any other reference to reveal the original documents, which were copied and pasted without even slight paraphrases.
Sánchez had a very good relationship with Miguel Sebastián, whom José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero made Minister of Industry, Tourism and Commerce in 2008 and who was, precisely, the prologue writer of the book ‘the new economic diplomacy’. Previously, between 2004 and 2006, Sebastián had been general director of the Economic Office of the President of the Government, an institution created especially for him after the victory of the PSOE in the March 2004 elections, marked by the terrorist attacks of 11-M.
Miguel Sebastián was in charge of designing a large part of the economic policy of the Zapatero Government. To this end, he led a group of young social-democratic professionals baptized as Economists 2004, in which he included Pedro Sánchez, who at that time was, in addition to being a socialist politician, a graduate in Economics and Business Sciences from the Royal College of María Cristina University. a center attached to the Complutense University of Madrid.
Sánchez struck up a great friendship with the fellow member of Economistas 2004 Carlos Ocaña Orbis, young economist most trusted by Miguel Sebastián. In fact, Ocaña would later become Chief of Staff of the Minister of Industry.
Then, in July 2012, he went to work for Real Madrid as a ‘project manager’ and director of Corporate Projects and Regulation. He rose to deputy general manager of the club and member of the Executive Committee, a position in which he currently remains.
Regarding his training, as stated in his Linkedin profile, Carlos Ocaña graduated in Economics from the Complutense University in 2003 and then studied at the IESE Business School (2012) and, in 2017, at MIT Sloan. Massachusetts School of Management (USA).
Telecom entry
To date, SEPI had notified that it had reached 6% of the company’s share capital. The Government’s intention is for the State to reach up to 10% of Telefónica, to act as a counterweight to the Saudis of STC, who also aspire to reach that percentage. The disbursement for the State would exceed 2,000 million euros.
Market sources suggest that the theoretical percentage that gives access to a position on the board is 6.7%, as the body and the shareholder balance are designed. However, there are shareholders like BBVA that sit on the board of directors with less than 5%; In this case, however, it is a deference to the bank as a historical shareholder.
As ABC published, the Government was not going to allow the Saudis from STC to join the Telefónica board until the Spanish State had entered through the SEPI. Said and done, while sources from the Arab telecom environment assured that if the Spanish State requests, for the moment, one advisor, they will ask for two if they reach the 9.9% that they have committed, yes, waiting for the Government Give them the ‘OK’ for the percentage you have in derivatives (5%).
