José María Figueres
About
José María Figueres was Costa Rica’s president from 1994 to 1998 and served as a managing director and later as CEO of the World Economic Forum from 2000 until 2004. He resigned following allegations that he had received more than $900,000 in consulting fees from a French telecommunications company, in breach of WEF rules. Figueres called the accusation “unfounded and unsubstantiated.”In the data
In 2001 and 2002, during his time with WEF, Figueres sat on the board of directors of Energia Global International Ltd., a renewable-energy company incorporated in Bermuda in 1997 with business interests in Central and South America. In 2001, EGI became a subsidiary of Enel SpA when the Italian power company bought it for $73 million, plus $37 million in debt cancellation, according to news reports.
Appleby records show that Figueres’ brother Mariano and Timothy Phillips, an EGI founder and an adviser to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, were company officers. Figueres resigned from EGI’s board of directors with a handwritten note dated December 2001 from Davos, Switzerland, where the WEF holds its annual meeting.
In 2003, the company moved to Delaware from Bermuda because, according to an Appleby note, “[d]ue to changes in tax laws in EU, Bermuda is now classified as a negative tax jurisdiction for Italian shareholders.”
