Goodbye to all that? With Andronico Luksic Craig looking on, Jane Fraser makes her exit from the May 2019 press event marking the repayment of the Banco de Chile’s subordinated debt.

Jane Fraser, who was named last week to succeed Michael Corbat as CEO of Citigroup, has longstanding business ties to one of Chile’s most powerful business conglomerates, the Luksic Group.

Antofagasta Plc, the company with plans to mine copper and nickel on the edge of the Boundary Waters, is among the conglomerate’s principal holdings — which is why I thought it would be instructive to start looking at the Fraser-Luksic connection as Citigroup prepares for its leadership transition.

It’s unclear just how much exposure Fraser has had to the mining side of the sprawling Luksic business empire. Citibank’s dealings with the Luksic Group over the years appear to be primarily through Quiñenco SA, the financial holding company through which the group controls its investments. It is clear, however, that Fraser enjoys a fairly close business relationship with Andronico Luksic Craig.

Fraser’s relationship with Andronico Luksic Craig and the Luksic Group developed as she came up through Citigroup’s Latin American leadership ranks. After a four-year stint from 2009-2013 as CEO of Citi Private Bank, which serves the bank’s wealthiest customers, the Luksic family possibly among them, Fraser was CEO of Citigroup Latin America from 2015-2018. During that period, she also served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Banco de Chile, co-chair with Andronico Luksic Craig.

The role came with the job. In 2007, Citigroup and Luksic-controlled Quiñenco SA established a partnership that gave Citi a 32.9 percent stake in LQ Inversiones Financieras, the Quiñenco subsidiary that has held a controlling stake in Banco de Chile since 2002. (This was, not coincidentally, the year Andronico Luksic Abaroa handed the reins to his sons Andronico and Guillermo.) The Luksic Group grew rapidly after its move into banking, growing in value from $1.9 billion to $15.6 billion over a ten year period, according to a 2017 London Mining Network report, and “profits were increasingly linked to financial capital and speculation.” Citi took part in that spectacular growth, and in 2010 increased its stake in LQIF to 50 percent.

The partnership with Citigroup also helped the bank through the final stages of its recovery from the financial crises of 1982-3, culminating in the repayment of the bank’s subordinated debt in May of 2019. A “dark chapter” of the Pinochet period had come to a close, thirty years after Pinochet fell from power. The event must have had special significance for Luksic, whose family had decamped to London after the 1973 military coup and only returned to Chilean investment circles with the onset of the financial crisis and recession of the 1980s. Settling the debt of the Banco de Chile must have felt like an act of historical redemption.

In the press conference organized for the occasion, Fraser appeared in the Paseo Ahumada side by side with Luksic and Mario Marcel, the president of Chile’s central bank.

Fraser is now set to become one of Wall Street’s most powerful bankers. Asked to comment on her promotion, Luksic was effusive in his praise, calling Fraser a “pioneering woman” and a “tremendous leader” who will make “an enormous contribution not only to Citigroup, but to the entire financial industry.”

It is still too early to say what, if anything, her move north might mean for Luksic’s business fortunes or the Chilean mining company’s North American ambitions.