Since 2018, former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has been in a relationship with Catalan businesswoman Susana Gallardo. The couple even got married in 2019. Since then, he has received the unconditional support of his wife in his attempt to comeback politics in France after failing in Barcelona; he has just suffered yet another setback during the 2022 legislative elections. But who is this woman at the head of an immense fortune?
Now 57, Susana Gallardo is from Barcelona and is a figure of the Catalan upper class. But she is in favor of a united Spain and it is not for nothing that she supported her husband Manuel Valls when he targeted the mayor of Barcelona under the anti-independence banner. She’s there granddaughter of Antonio Gallardo Carreras, founder of Almirall pharmaceutical laboratories. A company which notably generated a turnover of 855 million euros in 2019… The heiress, who studied political science and economics at Oxford and graduated in banking and finance from the City of London Polytechnic, is member since 2020 of the Supervisory Board of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.
Susana Gallardo also chairs the family council of Landon Grupo Corporativo (in real estate) while managing his family’s interests in Almirall and good grower (which manages the second largest group of private hospitals in Spain). Previously, she was a director of Abertis and vice-president of Pronovias. She sat on the board of directors of CaixaBank but was also a member of the board of directors of Criteria Caixa and chair of its audit committee.
On the private side, Susana Gallardo was married for more than thirty years to Alberto Palatchi, former boss of Pronovias, a house specializing in wedding dresses, in which he sold his shares to a British group for an estimated sum of between 550 and 655 million. dollars. In 2018, the magazine Forbes estimated the fortune of this one at 1.1 billion dollars (about 933 million euros) … We imagine that she did not come out of her divorce empty-handed. With her ex-husband, the businesswoman had three children.