Brazil & Southern Cone - June 2026

Chile’s President José Antonio Kast has appointed economist Bernardo Fontaine as the new chairman of Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, with a mandate to streamline the state-owned mining company and return it to growth. Along with other changes to Codelco’s leadership, Fontaine’s appointment was framed by Chile’s Minister of Economy and Mining Daniel Mas in stark terms, citing a “worrying level of indebtedness” and a “stagnation in production” at the copper giant.

On 14 May the Kast administration officially named Fontaine as successor to Máximo Pacheco, who completed his four-year term on 25 May. Fontaine assumed the chairmanship on 26 May, alongside two newly appointed board directors: Luz Granier, a commercial engineer with public and private sector experience who had previously held senior positions in the ministries of mining, energy and public works, and Alejandro Canut de Bon, a lawyer who had previous led the legal teams of various mining companies.

Fontaine is an economist and commercial engineer who graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. With over 30 years of professional experience, he has served on the boards of more than 20 companies spanning industry, finance, real estate, insurance, retail, logistics, and public services – including the traditional department store Falabella and the underground Metro de Santiago. Fontaine was forced to resign from Citigroup Chile in 1996 after an investment went sour with massive repercussions for taxpayers and pension funds.

During the second term of former president Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), Fontaine entered politics when he became active in formulating economic policies for the opposition. Though officially an independent, he has close ties to Chile Vamos, the coalition of right-of-centre parties that held power during the second term of former president Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022).

Fontaine was elected a member of Chile’s Constitutional Convention in 2022 and became closely associated with the Kast campaign during the 2025 election and in the subsequent government handover period, helping design key policy measures for the administration’s first 90 days. He declined ministerial office but accepted the Codelco chairmanship, describing the challenge in blunt terms: “Codelco is running with a lead backpack. We need to lighten it.”

His appointment has not been without controversy. In November 2025, his foundation Ciudadanos en Acción was linked in press reports to alleged digital campaign bots targeting presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei and Jeannette Jara – accusations Fontaine flatly denied. Critics, including former Finance Minister Nicolás Grau, questioned his lack of direct mining sector experience. Opposition voices called it a politically motivated appointment at a critical moment for the company.

Fontaine’s arrival comes at one of the most turbulent moments in Codelco’s recent history. The company has been facing structural headwinds: aging ore deposits, delays in major expansion projects, a string of safety incidents including a deadly tunnel collapse at the El Teniente mine last year, and a debt burden that Fontaine himself summed up by noting that over the past four years the company transferred US$7bn to the Chilean state while increasing its own debt by more than that amount. The company’s medium-term goal remains a recovery to 1.7m tonnes of annual production by 2030.

Accounting scandal

In recent months, Codelco was hit by an accounting scandal, in which 2025 production figures were inflated to show that the company was rebounding, even though in reality output had fallen and reached its lowest level in nearly three decades. Following the internal audit that revealed the fraud, Codelco subsequently fired one executive and disciplined several others in May, referring the matter to public prosecutors to determine whether criminal conduct had occurred. Against this backdrop, Economy and Mining Minister Daniel Mas said that the new board would carry a special mandate to conduct a full investigation.