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MILAN — Sergio Marchionne, a charismatic and demanding leader who engineered two long-shot corporate turnarounds to save both Fiat and Chrysler from near-certain failure, died Wednesday. He was 66.

The holding company of Fiat’s founders, the Agnelli family, announced in a statement Marchionne’s death after complications from surgery in Zurich.

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“Unfortunately what we feared has come to pass,” Fiat heir John Elkann said. “Sergio Marchionne, man and friend, is gone.”

Marchionne built the dysfunctional companies into the world’s seventh-largest automaker almost by personal force of will, living on a corporate jet crossing the Atlantic to push employees to accomplish what most people thought was impossible amid a devastating global recession.

Photo by AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File

Marchionne, who was Italian and Canadian, had revived Fiat by 2009 when he was picked by the U.S. government to save U.S.-based Chrysler from its trip through bankruptcy protection after being owned by a private equity company.

“It’s highly unlikely that Chrysler would exist today had he not taken that gamble,” said Autotrader.com analyst Michelle Krebs. “The company was in such bad shape, being stripped of any kind of resources by the previous owners.”