Banking heavyweight Gabriel Sanint Jaramillo joins Minerva’s board

The former president of Citibank in Colombia and Mexico was elected as an independent member of multispecies meat processor Minerva’s board of directors at the company’s last meeting in São Paulo.

Minerva, one of Brazil’s biggest beef processors by sales, said Jaramillo boasted “broad financial experience​” and helped transform Banco Santander into the third-largest financial institution in Brazil.

Jaramillo has also been president of Banco Santander in Colombia, Brazil and in the USA. In his professional life he also worked to better integrate Latin America’s financial sector.

He joins Minerva as the beef, pork and chicken processor recently enjoyed six years of revenue growth, up to the end 2016. The company may have enjoyed further export growth in 2017, but its full-year figures have not yet been seen.

Its latest trade figures suggest it is still a rosy picture for Minerva. The company’s third quarter earnings, posted in November 2017, showed gross profit of BRL440m (US$138m), up 12% year-on-year.

The meatpacker came off better than its rival JBS in Brazil’s rotten meat  scandal​ last year, but has still been frozen out of the US market​, although the company expected exports to resume in the first quarter of 2018.