Fernando González Urbaneja recalls his first meeting with Luis Valls in 1976, after the journalist published an important interview with Emilio Botín in El País. In that article, Botín wanted to make clear the banking sector’s support for democracy during a time of great change. A couple of months later, Luis Valls called Urbaneja with the intention of conveying his own message.

Valls, always meticulous in his approaches, invited González Urbaneja to lunch at the Beatriz building. During that meeting, he provided material and information about himself, the bank, and the various issues of the time.

That first conversation between them lasted for hours, and González Urbaneja was impressed by Valls’s ability to listen and ask questions. They shared a mutual interest in Machiavelli, which led González Urbaneja to affectionately nickname him “the Florentine,” referring to the cunning and depth of the Florentines of the 16th century.

For González Urbaneja, Valls was also a mentor who taught him about banking and management. But he notes that “what interested him most was people.” Valls was a renowned banker and also a philanthropist, always in anonymity, and he kept his philanthropic efforts separate from his professional role.

According to the veteran and esteemed journalist, from a political perspective, “Valls was a liberal in the broad sense and a democrat,” and he highlights that it was “the first bank to extend credit to the Communist Party” in the late 1970s.

One of the qualities Urbaneja remembers about Luis Valls is his meticulousness, noting that “when a mistake was made in the bank, one could spend two weeks analyzing where the process had gone wrong.”

Urbaneja emphasizes Valls’s faith and adds, “He was not only meticulous but also shy, discreet, and above all, extraordinarily polite.”