Biography | Willie Walsh — The Paternoster Floor Where IAG Shares Replaced BA and Iberia

People treat International Airlines Group as a holding company that was always there.

On the morning of 24 January 2011 it appeared on a tape for the first time.

Walsh stood in the London Stock Exchange at 10 Paternoster Square with IAG chairman Antonio Vázquez Romero and LSE chief executive Xavier Rolet as trading opened at 8.00 a.m. London time.

The listings of British Airways and Iberia were cancelled the same morning. Owners of those shares received IAG paper instead.

The holding company itself had been completed three days earlier, on 21 January, after a merger process that had run for about two and a half years.

IAG's main listing was London. Secondary lines opened in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia. The shares closed the first London session at 285 pence, up 0.9 percent on the BBC's close, and the new group was valued at about £5.3 billion.

British Airways shareholders took 55 percent of the new company.

Walsh's public line that morning, reported by the BBC and by Flightglobal, was that BA and Iberia were the first two airlines in IAG and would not be the last. He had already drawn a target list of about a dozen carriers.

The exchange building is the right pin.

The moment was not a board vote in Harmondsworth or a signing in Madrid. It was the first print of a ticker that replaced two national flag carriers with one Spanish-registered holding company run from London.

Keith Williams took the BA chair. Rafael Sánchez-Lozano took Iberia. Walsh kept the group job until September 2020, delayed past a planned March exit by the first covid season, and handed it to Luis Gallego.

Aer Lingus joined the same group in 2015. The man who had learned to fly for that airline in Dublin was, by then, running the holding company that bought it.

Photo: London Stock Exchange, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons