Alexandre Fonseca, the child of the Revolution who changed Altice
Altice’s chairman has stepped aside after the "Operation Picoas" searches. Meet the executive who made Meo’s owner the market leader, was promoted to the top of the group and is now leaving (for an indefinite period).
Born on 26 April 1974, the day after the Revolution, Alexandre Fonseca, 49, rose to prominence for having “revolutionised” the leadership of Altice Portugal, before reaching the group’s international top team last year. On Monday, after being the target of searches by the Public Prosecutor’s Office as part of “Operation Picoas”, the same operation that led to the arrest of Altice’s co-founder Armando Pereira, the executive and engineer decided to step aside in order, he says, to “protect the interests” of the company. But investors are already penalising the company: bonds issued by Altice USA maturing in 2028 fell 7.1 cents against their face value (1 euro), to 56.8 cents, the biggest daily fall since March 2020, according to Bloomberg.
Who is Alexandre Fonseca? And how did he get here? Until 2017, the year he was promoted to chief executive (CEO) of PT Portugal (by then already owned by the Altice group, which is controlled by the billionaire Patrick Drahi and has Armando Pereira as a partner), few knew his name outside the telecoms sector. Alexandre Fonseca was making his mark as the board member in charge of technology (CTO) and, before that, already had a management record in the same sector: he was CTO of Cabovisão, CEO of Oni and CEO of Oni Moçambique.
AI translation from the Portuguese. First published in ECO on 18 July 2023.