Director of ACCIONA Concessions. Juan José Clavería

And this is a vocation he’s always had.

My first memories go back to my father when he was working on the “Motorway of the Mediterranean”. I was eight or nine at the time and when I was asked to do a project at school it always had to have something to do with a motorway… a toll road to be more exact!

But you didn’t go on to study  engineering?…

No. I went to Civil Engineering School, but I left it. I’m a frustrated engineer. I am, actually, an economist; I have a Master’s in Financial Management. I began working for Dragados in the planning and management control area. Then I went into project finance, worked on projects in South Africa and the United Kingdom, which gave me the opportunity to get to know the Anglo- Saxon model in detail. Afterwards, I joined Caja Madrid and from there, in 2001, I took the leap to ACCIONA and the Concessions area. Four years later, I moved to Ahorro Corporación, and rejoined ACCIONA as Director of Concessions in January 2013.

Is it difficult to leave and come back?

It was a good experience. There is a before and after with these things. The change ACCIONA went through was important, going from a constructor-concessionaire group to an infrastructure and energy group. And before I walked the corridors and knew everyone. This time it’s different.

The world of concessions has always attracted you and your training is finance. How do you combine these elements?

The concessions business is predominantly financial. We orchestrate the capital, the debt, in order to build a project, and operate and maintain it over time, but in truth it’s a financial business, in which you need to find the money to undertake a project. In the end, you end up having a mix of people in your team between engineers and financials. And I think this is good.

Do you travel a lot? Do you get time to do other things?

Well, you lose touch with everything. When I think about how I used to play padel, golf… a thousand things. Now, I’ve got no time to spare. The diary is full and I travel over 100 days a year. In 2013, no sooner than I rejoined ACCIONA, I was travelling around the world. Here, that takes about a week. I’ve known us get to New Zealand, Australia and Canada all in the same week.

That’s a tough schedule, but supposedly it is essential in your line of work. What do you get out of it?

One of the things I like — and we speak about it a lot bet ween us — is the global nature of the work. You’re building a tramway in Australia, a hospital in Peru and a road in Ca- nada all at the same time. This is of incalculable professional and personal added value. And, of course, the number of people you get to know in places all over the world, and they are so different. If someone asked me tomorrow, what I would like to be reincarnated as, I’d reply: the same as I am today.  I would like to do the same thing

In figures

24 concessions in six countries

5.800 million euros under construction

15 transport projects

1.250 kilometers of highways

6 hospitals

3.500 hospital beds

52% pre-qualification

UNITED STATES, A COMPLEX MARKET

The United States is new territory for ACCIONA Concessions, but a market it intends to study with great interest. “We are analyzing opportunities mainly in three states: Florida, Texas and Virginia,” commented Juan José Clavería. Nevertheless, he sees the US as “a complicated market, in which projects have a very long period of maturity, up to five or six years.” That instability means some projects are placed on the back burner for a considerable time prior to launch. Another difficulty: “It is complicated finding local partners, because there are no big constructors and few industrials, just lots of financial players”, Mr Clavería pointed out. However, “if we choose carefully”, ACCIONA can enter the US concessions market gradually.