Antonio Sáinz de Vicuña only meant to come to Frankfurt for three years. Headhunted to help set up the legal department of the European Monetary Institute (EMI) in 1994, he moved to Germany expecting that the project would fail and he’d soon be back in his native Madrid. “The Spanish governor told me that the project would not succeed and there would not be a monetary union,” he remembers.
Fast forward 16 years and he’s firmly settled in Frankfurt, heading up a team of 70 lawyers and support staff as Director General of Legal Services for what is now the ECB. It was, says Sáinz de Vicuña, an unexpected turn in his career to end up in Germany, as most Spaniards choose to pursue their profession domestically.
He arrived in Frankfurt via university in Madrid and...