Leopoldo Fernández Pujals

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He was born in La Habana, Cuba, into a well-to-do family. His grandfather was an Asturian emigrant and on his mother's side his origins are Catalan.

In 1960 his family went into exile in Miami. In 1968 he entered the Marines, at the officer school at Fort Belvoir, in the state of Virginia, where he was number one in his class, later becoming an instructor. He was in the Vietnam War, from which he returned home with a medal and the rank of captain.

He studied finance and went to work at the multinational Procter&Gamble, later moving to Johnson&Johnson, through which he came to Spain in 1981.

Six years later, he decided to make a radical change in his life. He opened a pizzeria in the Pilar neighborhood in Madrid in which he himself kneaded the dough and gave it to the neighborhood children to try until he discovered the secret of his recipe.

He then set up, as a test, Pizzaphone, which later became Telepizza.

By 1993 he already had 100 stores in Spain, which grew to 150 a year later and to 204 the following year.

In 1996, he took sole control of the company after a confrontation with his brother over its management. Telepizza went public on the Spanish stock exchange and began a dizzying trajectory.

In May 1997 he acquired Pizza World for 1.9 billion pesetas, later a transportation company and then that of his cheese supplier.

By mid-1998 he had achieved a 62 percent market share. The business continued to grow and diversify both in Spain and abroad.

In 1999 he sold all his shares, an operation through which he received approximately 300 million euros.

In Segovia he created the largest purebred Spanish horse stud farm known as Centurión. In September 2004 he launched into the telecommunications world, by acquiring 24.9 percent of Jazztel, a broadband operator created in 1997 by Argentine Martín Varsavsky.

Fernández Pujals contributed 61.8 million euros to relaunch the company.

In 2009 with an initial investment of one million euros, Leopoldo Fernández Pujals set out to be the direct competition to his own creation. Along with two former partners and friends from Telepizza, Miguel Fernández and Pedro Español, the businessman launched a restaurant chain under the name of La Original, with which they aimed to rival the all-powerful Telepizza.

By 2010 Fernández Pujal is a man of proven experience in the business world who has been able to increase the value of the companies in which he has worked, and even those he himself has created, to return that value to the partners and shareholders of those same companies. He hopes to be able to transfer that experience to the rest of the breeders so they can increase the profitability of their ranches and together put the purebred Spanish horse on the world podium that it deserves.