Cecilio Madero Villarejo

Cecilio Madero Villarejo is senior counsel at APCO Worldwide since March 2023. He has over three decades of experience as an antitrust enforcer and regulator at the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission. During his long career as a public official, Cecilio Madero held numerous senior positions. He got his first managerial tasks in 1995 when he was appointed head of a state aid unit in charge of manufacturing sectors. In 1999 he became head of an antitrust unit dealing with cases relating to information, communication and media where paradigmatic investigations and decisions were instructed and adopted, with him as case manager. In 2007 he was appointed as director of information, communication and media until 2011. From 2011 to 2019, he was deputy-director general for antitrust and cartels. He was appointed deputy director-general of mergers in 2019, position that he retained until October 2020, that he retired from the Commission. Between those times he was acting director general of DG COMP. Cecilio Maderos’s career at the Commission began when he joined DG Competition in 1987. There, he accrued valuable experience in leading global regulatory and antitrust work, some of which are now recognized as landmark policy decisions and cases for competition law. Prior to joining the European Commission, he worked at Banco Bilbao in Spain for five years. Cecilio Madero is a graduate of the Complutense University in Madrid where he studied law. He has Diplomas in European Studies delivered by the Spanish Diplomatic School and the University of Grenoble, France.