Santamaria promoted to head IRIDIUM

Juan Santamaria, who headed the US P3 business for ACS, has become CEO of IRIDIUM.

Groupo ACS has appointed long-time company official Juan Santamaria as chief executive officer (CEO) of IRIDIUM Concesiones de Infraestructuras, its global concessions business.

Santamaria is a veteran of ACS, a publicly traded company headquartered in Madrid, Spain, in which he has been steadily promoted.

Beginning in 2006, Santamaria served with ACS Infrastructure Development, the North America-focused public-private partnership (PPP; P3) arm of ACS. Santamaria held the title of chief operating officer (COO) before being named CEO in 2011.

From 2002 until he moved to ACS Infrastructure Development, Santamaria was a director with Dragados Concessions, a construction concern ACS acquired in 2003.

Under Santamaria, ACS Infrastructure Development secured the 35-year lease for Interstate 595 (I-595), a $1.7 billion deal that was the first P3 for the state of Florida and the first concession in the US to use an availability payment structure.

In 2010, he also led ACS to a billion-dollar agreement to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the ‘Windsor Essex Parkway,’ a road connecting Canada's Ontario Highway 401 with the US.