mpw: europe, middle east &amp; africa

More than half the members of our EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) list are heads of major companies, six are new­comers, and 10 are located in the U.K. One surprise: Nine of our MPWs—including No. 1 Ana Botín­ of ­Banco ­Santan­der—work in finance, a sector known for its dearth of women. See this year's other MPW lists:
<a href="http://fortune.com/most-powerful-women/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">U.S. Edition</a>
<a href="http://fortune.com/most-powerful-women-asia-pacific/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Asia-Pacific Edition</a>

Botín has wasted little time remaking Banco Santander in her own style since becoming Executive Chairman after her father’s death in September 2014. She has overhauled management at the bank—which, with $100.7 billion in revenues, <a href="http://fortune.com/global500/banco-santander-67/" target="_blank">ranked No. 67</a> on the <a href="http://fortune.com/global500/" target="_blank">2015 Global 500</a>—raised capital, and strengthened its financial condition. She is also putting new focus on customer experience at Santander, which is the second largest in Europe by market value. Profits for the company increased 33% in 2014. —Erika Fry

Ana Botín

The 49-year-old tobacco exec completed Imperial’s $7.1 billion acquisition of some of Reynolds American’s U.S. assets—a deal that landed the company brands such as Winston, Kool and Salem. Elsewhere, the world’s fourth largest cigarette seller, which raked in $22.7 billion in 2014, is consolidating brands—an effort to make its business, which operates in 160 countries more efficient. Smoking rates may be falling, but Imperial’s stock has risen 20% since September 2014. —Erika Fry

Alison Cooper

This is Falkengren’s tenth year atop SEB and 28th year at the company—and she is leading her organization through unprecedented times. The Nordic bank executive, whose cautious style proved wise during the financial crisis, is now guiding her organization through an era of negative interest rates. An outspoken critic of Europe’s central banks recently, Falkengren has focused on building capital buffers in case of unexpected losses—and, for retail clients, limiting their exposure to risky loans. Her bank’s profits were up 21% in 2014. —Erika Fry

Annika Falkengren

It was a tough year for Sabancı, whose $13 billion-in-revenue financial and industrial conglomerate, Sabancı Holding, posted modest gains in 2014, because of a weakening Eurozone and the Middle East crisis. But Sabancı’s power in the region is undeniable: A member of Siemens’ supervisory board, she began acting as co-chair of the Business 20 (B20) Trade Task Force—an outreach group for the G20 economies—earlier this year. She is also a formidable voice for women’s empowerment in Turkey, a nation with one of the worst gender gaps in the workplace; the university founded and chaired by Sabancı made headlines last year when it published a <a href="http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/25972/1/BADV_Report.pdf" target="_blank">report on the impact of domestic violence</a> against white-collar working women in Turkey. It is the first study of its kind in the country. —Rupali Arora

Güler Sabancı

Previously an executive with Alliance Boots, Barra’s responsibilities grew considerably with the official creation of Walgreens Boots Alliance in December 2014. The supersized pharmacy chain—Barra helped lead the integration of the two companies—has 370,000 employees and a market cap of $96 billion. Barra’s role at the new company, which is headed by her partner Stefano Pessina, is likewise staggering: she runs the pharmaceutical wholesale business, which spans 19 countries and a network of 200,000 some pharmacies and healthcare providers, as well as international retail. She’s also now spearheading Walgreen Boots Alliance’s corporate social responsibility efforts and supervises global communications. —Erika Fry

Ornella Barra

In a year of change in the art world, Barbizet was appointed by Christie’s billionaire owner François Pinault to replace CEO Steven Murphy on December 2nd, 2014, making her the first female boss of the 249-year-old auction house. Since then she has set a new sales record at Christie’s, with revenue up 8% to $4.5 billion in the first half of this year. The 26-year group veteran—Barbizet is also CEO of Pinault's holding company Artémis, with $33 billion in assets, and vice-chair of his luxury empire, Kering (think Gucci)—is also working to diversify Artémis’ portfolio. Recent acquisitions include French luxury cruise-ship operator Ponant and luxury watchmaker Ulysse Nardin. She also holds seats on the boards of Total and Peugeot. —Rupali Arora

Patricia Barbizet

Under McCall’s charge, the budget airline beat its earnings target yet again in 2014, with profits of $957 million, up 28%, and the stock price up 11% even as competitors battled losses in a tough business environment. The former publishing executive has emphasized innovation, rewarding investors with a 277% increase in market capitalization in the five years she has piloted the carrier. McCall plans to use drones at the airline’s engineering bases across Europe and is also in exploratory discussions with 3D printing firms to see how they can be used to help manufacture aircraft parts. Prime Minister David Cameron nominated McCall, a non-executive director of Burberry, to his new Business Advisory Group in July. —Rupali Arora

Carolyn McCall

In December 2014, Véronique Laury took the reins of Kingfisher Plc, Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, after a year of weak sales. So far, she’s had a mixed start. In March, Laury introduced a strategic plan to standardize the company’s businesses across Europe—a decision greeted warmly by analysts. But that same week, the company’s planned acquisition of its French competitor Mr. Bricolage, which was announced last year, disintegrated. The collapse of the deal was an embarrassment for the freshly-minted CEO, who previously ran Kingfisher’s French Castorama business. —Claire Groden

Véronique Laury

Greene got her first raise in the five years that she’s been heading up the United Kingdom’s mail service, but it came along with criticism that she got it in the same year that more than 5,000 of Royal Mail’s employees were laid off. In her five years atop the 500-year-old mail service, Greene has accomplished quite a lot, including successfully privatizing it in 2013 and cutting costs by almost $65 million last year. The native Canadian faces a tough business climate as letter volumes continue to decline and her plans to boost revenue through package growth have been challenged by Amazon’s launch of its own delivery network. —Claire Groden

Moya Greene

Senequier has gained significant market power since she spun out private equity group Ardian from insurance giant AXA in 2013. Assets are up 38% to $50 billion since then, with 79% of investors coming from outside of France. Ardian, majority owned by its 350 employees, is a major investor in European infrastructure and one of the biggest providers of private debt to European midcap companies. A former French insurance commissioner , Senequier is the only female in an eight-member executive team, and is also vice-president of the supervisory board of Hermès. —Rupali Arora

Dominique Senequier

Maria Ramos has led Barclays Africa since 2013, when she oversaw Absa Group Limited’s acquisition of some of Barclay Bank’s African entities and changed the group’s name to Barclays Africa Group Limited. The Portuguese-South African is about halfway through a three-year growth strategy she announced in 2014 to expand the bank’s operations outside of South Africa. So far, it seems to be going well: at the end of last year, the company’s return on equity was the highest since 2008, and revenue from operations outside of South Africa grew by 9% in the period ending June 2015. Now, Ramos is working on acquiring operations in Egypt and Zimbabwe from her parent company, Barclays Plc. —Claire Groden

Maria Ramos

Leroy took over the Belgian telecom company’s top job in 2014, stepping in after the company’s largest shareholder—the Belgian government—fired her predecessor for publicly criticizing it. After a downward slide in revenue before she took over, Leroy revived Proximus’s business in 2014, closing the year with net profit up 3.8%. The company grew its TV customers by 8.7% and mobile customers by 10.4%, in part by focusing on improving customer service. In early 2015, the company introduced free LTE access to its customers. —Claire Groden

Dominique Leroy

The first female—and first American—CEO of Wolters Kluwer in the Netherlands, McKinstry has led a digital transformation of the 175-year old Dutch publishing house. Wolters Kluwer’s stock price has doubled since she took charge a decade ago, and the firm has returned half of its cash to shareholders in 2015 in the form of dividends and share buybacks. McKinstry is the only CEO of a Dutch-listed company who has fulfilled the government’s target to have 30% women on company boards by 2016. And over half of the company’s 19,000 employees are women. —Rupali Arora

Nancy McKinstry

Based in Toronto, Broader is President and CEO of the Walmart’s EMEA region. That also gives her oversight of what will soon be the mass retailer’s two largest international markets—the UK and Canada (where she recently announced Walmart would soon open 113 more stores). Also under her purview: MassMart, the second largest retailer in Africa, which has a presence in twelve countries on the continent and saw 10.4% sales growth in 2014. Last year, Broader was named to President Obama’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa; she chairs the Supply Chain committee. —Erika Fry

Shelley Broader

Promoted last year to oversee the telecom giant’s key markets of Africa, Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific (AMAP), Timuray has lived up to the board’s expectations; her division delivered a standout performance in 2014, with $21 billion in sales, up 7% in 2014, which helped offset declining sales in Europe. The former P&amp;G marketing exec has expanded her hugely successful “Farmers’ Club Initiative”—a social business model to help boost farmers’ productivity with mobile services like virtual marketplaces—to emerging countries. Food conglomerate Danone recently appointed Timuray as an independent director. —Rupali Arora

Serpil Timuray

The CEO of Saudi-based Olayan Financing Company is a mainstay on our list. She has run her family’s diversified holding company, whose activities span 12 sectors and range from investing and real estate to the manufacture and distribution of foreign beverages (like Coca-Cola), cookies (like Nabisco’s Oreos) and heavy equipment (like Cummins’ engines), since 1986. A rare female business executive in the Middle East, she is a pioneering figure in her native Saudi Arabia. She is also prominent on the world stage as a Davos regular and a member of many corporate and philanthropic boards. —Erika Fry
Read more about Lubna Olayan in “<a href="http://fortune.com/2015/09/14/lubna-olayan-saudi-arabia/" target="_blank">This CEO is helping Saudi women break a gender barrier</a>.”

Lubna Olayan

Corley helms Europe’s largest asset management fund (a unit of financial services giant Allianz and peer of U.S. based PIMCO). With assets of $488 billion, her division’s operating profit was up 12% last year. Despite low interest rates in Europe, the fund drew in record net client inflows of $11.9 billion in 2014 after years of flat growth. This year Corley was recognized by the Governor of the Bank of England for her active role in promoting best practices in wholesale fixed income, currency and the commodity markets; in June she was appointed interim chair of England’s FICC Markets Standards Board (FMSB). A director of Pearson, Corley is also an acclaimed novelist; she published her fifth crime thriller —The Dead of Winter—last year. —Rupali Arora

Elizabeth Corley

The publicity-shy Ealet has one of the most high-profile jobs in global finance. She became a global head of securities for Goldman Sachs in 2012, a position that she shares with two colleagues; the team oversees 44% of the $40 billion investment bank’s annual revenues. Ealet joined Goldman in 1991, and her trajectory—Managing Director at 34 (1997); Executive Committee member (2008); and a prodigious stint atop the firm’s Commodities division (for which she earned the nickname “queen of commodities”)—has led some to speculate that she may be the first woman to run the bank. Ealet is French and began her career at the oil firm Total. —Erika Fry

Isabelle Ealet

It’s been an historic year for the French gas utility company GDF Suez. Last October, Chief Executive Gerard Mastrallet promoted then-CFO Isabelle Kocher to deputy CEO—a position that prepares her to take the reins when he retires in 2016. And in April, the two announced the company had a new name, “Engie.” GDF Suez’s name originated during the 2008 merger between Gaz de France and Suez, the company that built the Suez Canal. The new moniker signals Kocher’s desire to shed the company’s colonial past and to focus on sustainable energy. If she becomes CEO, Kocher will be the only female leader of a company in France’s CAC 40 index. —Claire Groden

Isabelle Kocher

Pascale Witz has a master’s degree in molecular biology and started her career in a research lab—a pedigree far more common for a scientist than a business executive. But her career took off when she switched to the business side of pharmaceuticals, and she now heads Sanofi’s global divisions and strategic development—overseeing about $17 billion in revenue. In January 2016, after a company restructuring, she’ll be in charge of one of five global business units, overseeing Diabetes and Cardiovascular medicines. That division will include the cholesterol reducer Praluent, a potential blockbuster that was approved by the FDA in July. She’s also overseeing Sanofi’s partnership with Google’s life sciences team to advance new treatments for patients with diabetes, like contact lenses that monitor glucose levels. —Claire Groden

Pascale Witz

When Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the chairman of the third-largest commodities firm in the world, was dying of leukemia in 2008, he set up a family trust called Akira BV to hold his majority stake in the company. He designated his stay-at-home wife Margarita Louis-Dreyfus as the family trustee, ensuring the law- and economics-trained Russian would have the strongest position on the board when he passed away the following year. Despite having little experience, she rose to the occasion, ousting the Louis Dreyfus Chairman and CEO and, by 2011, installing herself as Chairperson of Louis Dreyfus Holding. This year, Margarita consolidated her power even more, increasing Akira’s controlling interest to a supermajority position. Louis Dreyfus Commodities handled around 80 million tons of commodities like rice and cotton in 2014, generating $64.7 billion in sales. —Claire Groden

Margarita Louis-Dreyfus

Berlusconi, daughter of Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has returned her family-owned holding company, Fininvest—businesses span television, radio, film, publishing, banking, biotechnology, and a soccer team—to profitability last year after two years in the red. She did it in part by selling off a 7.8% stake in TV broadcaster Mediaset and replacing the CEO of the group’s core business, Mondadori, Italy’s leading book and magazine publisher, where she is pushing an aggressive digital transformation. Also on the cards this year: a sale of 48% stake in the group’s world famous soccer club, A.C. Milan, for $530 million. —Rupali Arora

Marina Berlusconi

Rakefet Russak-Aminoach has been leaning in since 1992, when she started her career as the personal assistant to Bank Leumi’s then-deputy CEO Galia Maor (later known as Israel’s Iron Lady of banking). The two developed a close professional relationship—so much that Russak-Aminoach’s personal style hews very closely to Maor’s signature look of short tucked-behind-the-ears hair and dark red nails. Though the Israeli left her mentor’s tutelage and later became general manager of a major accounting firm, she eventually returned to Bank Leumi to work under then-CEO Maor. Russak-Aminoach took over the top job in 2012 and endured a rough first few years, marked by sinking profits and a U.S. tax evasion investigation. But 2015 is looking up. In the first half of the year, Bank Leumi raked in profits of $451 million, up 107% since the same period last year. —Claire Groden

Rakefet Russak-Aminoach

The London-based pharma exec runs the world’s leading over-the-counter pharma company—a $9.5 billion joint venture between GSK and its Swiss competitor Novartis, officially launched in March. Walmsley led the integration of the businesses, which resulted from a complex deal struck in April 2014. The company’s products are sold in 160 countries, with 42% of sales coming from emerging markets. In July, Walmsley, a lover of Italian red wine and Bikram yoga, was appointed to the board of Diageo. —Erika Fry

Emma Walmsley

Ann Cairns started her career in the North Sea, designing and testing pipelines for oil rigs. She was the first female engineer to work on offshore oil rigs in the UK—an environment that she’s said was less sexist than her next workplace in the investment banking industry. She worked for decades in banking—including 15 years in senior operational roles at Citigroup and overseeing the European side of Lehman Brothers Holdings International’s bankruptcy—before becoming #2 at MasterCard in 2011, overseeing all international growth. She is responsible for operations in all countries outside of the United States—generating 61% of the global payments technology company’s total net revenue of $9.5 billion last year. —Claire Groden

Ann Cairns

More than half the members of our EMEA list are heads of major companies, six are new­comers, and 10 are located in the U.K. One surprise: Nine of our MPWs—­including No. 1 Ana Botín­ of ­Banco ­Santan­der—work in finance, a sector known for its dearth of women.

MPW: Europe, Middle East &amp; Africa

MPW: Europe, Middle East & Africa