The Swiss hospital that treated Sergio Marchionne says the former Fiat Chrysler CEO received treatment for a serious illness for more than a year before he died. 
 
 "Due to serious illness, he had been the recipient of recurring treatment for more than a year," University Hospital Zurich said in a statement. "Although all the options offered by cutting-edge medicine were utilized, Mr. Marchionne unfortunately passed away." 
 
 The hospital said it was issuing the statement to combat rumors about how it treated the charismatic executive, who died Wednesday at age 66. He was known for reviving Fiat and Chrysler and bringing the brands together under one roof. 
 
 Questions have been raised in the media over how long Marchionne had been unwell, and whether Fiat Chrysler had been informed. The automaker said it was only made aware last week of a "serious deterioration" in Marchionne's condition. 
 
 "Due to medical privacy, the company had no knowledge of the facts relating to Mr. Marchionne's health," the company said in a statement on Thursday. 
 
 "The company was made aware that Mr. Marchionne had undergone shoulder surgery and released a statement about this," it said. 
 
 "On Friday July 20, the company was made aware with no detail by Mr. Marchionne's family of the serious deterioration in Mr. Marchionne's condition and that as a result he would be unable to return to work," it added. "The company promptly took and announced the appropriate action the following day." 
 
 Related: Marchionne was an outsider and an original 
 
 Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) had warned in its most recent annual report in February that Marchionne's ability to run the company was "critical to the execution of our strategic direction and implementation of our business plan." 
 
 "We have developed succession plans that we believe are appropriate, although it is difficult to predict with any certainty that we will be able to replace these [executives] with persons of equivalent experience and capabilities," the company said. 
 
 It's unusual for companies to require executives to disclose medical problems, according to HR professionals. However, some companies require their top brass to get annual health checks to protect their business interests. 
 
 Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) declined to comment on its health policies related to its top executives. ||||| ZURICH (Reuters) - Fiat Chrysler FCHI.MI said it knew nothing about the medical condition of Sergio Marchionne after a Swiss hospital said on Thursday it had been treating the deceased chief executive for more than a year. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: Formula One - F1 - Italian Grand Prix 2017 - Monza, Italy - September 3, 2017 Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne arrives before the race REUTERS/Max Rossi/File photo 
 
 “Due to medical privacy, the company had no knowledge of the facts relating to Mr. Marchionne’s health,” a Fiat Chrysler spokesman said. 
 
 Questions have been raised about how long Marchionne, who died on Wednesday, was ill and how much the company knew before it made the situation public. 
 
 Marchionne rescued Fiat and Chrysler from bankruptcy after taking the wheel of the Italian carmaker in 2004 and he multiplied Fiat’s value 11 times through 14 years of canny dealmaking. He was due to step down at FCA in April next year. 
 
 “The company was made aware that Mr. Marchionne had undergone shoulder surgery and released a statement about this,” the spokesperson said. 
 
 “On Friday July 20, the Company was made aware with no detail by Mr. Marchionne’s family of the serious deterioration in Mr. Marchionne’s condition and that as a result he would be unable to return to work. The Company promptly took and announced the appropriate action the following day.” 
 
 Asked whether the scope of the statement included the board and the chairman, the company declined to comment. 
 
 The announcement of the death of Marchionne, 66, one of the auto industry’s most tenacious and respected CEOs, drew tributes from rivals and tears from his closest colleagues on Wednesday. 
 
 University Hospital Zurich said earlier on Thursday Marchionne had been having treatment for a serious illness for more than a year before his death. 
 
 Marchionne had fallen gravely ill after what the company had 
 
 described as shoulder surgery at a Zurich hospital. He was replaced as chief executive last weekend after Fiat Chrysler (FCA) said his condition had worsened. 
 
 “Mr. Sergio Marchionne was a patient at USZ. Due to serious illness, he had been the recipient of recurring treatment for more than a year,” the hospital said in a statement. 
 
 “Although all the options offered by cutting-edge medicine were utilized, Mr. Marchionne unfortunately passed away.” 
 
 University Hospital Zurich declined to comment on Marchionne’s illness, but said it deeply regretted his death and expressed its condolences to his family. ||||| Sergio Marchionne, who engineered a merger of the auto industry’s weakest companies—Fiat and Chrysler—and turned the combination into a profit generator, died at the age of 66. 
 
 Mr. Marchionne was treated at Zurich’s University Hospital for complications after undergoing what Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV said was a surgical procedure on his right shoulder in July. The health issues forced the company to unexpectedly remove him as CEO on Saturday, speeding up a departure planned for early 2019 after a decade at the helm of the Italian-American auto maker. 
 
 Exor SpA, the company that controls Fiat Chrysler, on Wednesday announced Mr. Marchionne’s death. 
 
 While less known among the general public than predecessors such as Lee Iacocca, Mr. Marchionne was a star in the auto industry, and his death marks an end of an era in Detroit where he was one of the last larger-than-life CEOs. He relished challenging auto industry orthodoxy, and was ahead of rivals on some key automotive trends. 
 
 In a tweet late Wednesday, President Donald Trump called Mr. Marchionne “one of the most brilliant and successful car executives since the days of the legendary Henry Ford.” Broker Evercore ISI called him “one of the most formidable and successful CEOs in the industry’s history.” 
 
 Born in Chieti near Italy’s Adriatic coast on June 17, 1952, Mr. Marchionne moved with his parents to the Toronto area in 1966, according to Mondo Agnelli, a book about Fiat’s deal for Chrysler. Mr. Marchionne went to university and law school in Canada, where he later worked for Deloitte & Touche. In the 1980s, he made his way back to Europe, taking a series of increasingly high-level jobs at several industrial companies based in Switzerland. 
 
 Mr. Marchionne joined the board of Fiat in 2003 as head of Geneva-based SGS Group , then partly owned by the auto maker’s founding family. The following year he was vaulted into the CEO’s job at Fiat to fill a leadership vacuum at the top. 
 
 His restructuring of the problem-plagued Italian auto maker was helped by a $2 billion deal he struck with General Motors Co. in 2005, which allowed the American giant to exit a contract negotiated five years earlier that would have forced it to buy the 80% of Fiat’s car business it didn’t already own. 
 
 By the 2008 financial crisis, Chrysler LLC’s then-owner Cerberus Capital Management was looking to sell, and Mr. Marchionne was ready for the deal that would define his career. Underwritten by nearly $8 billion in loans from the U.S. and Canadian governments, Fiat took control of Chrysler after it filed for bankruptcy protection and wasted little time pushing out longtime executives, closing dealerships and reimagining its lineup. 
 
 Mr. Marchionne, who was known to wear a black sweater every day, had said he would wear a tie for FCA’s June 1 industrial plan presentation if the company had managed to pay back debt by then. It had, and Chairman John Elkann gave him a tie to wear. Photo: Luca Bruno/Associated Press 
 
 Instead of taking an office in an imposing tower for senior management on the campus of Chrysler’s headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., he set up his desk on the fourth floor of the adjoining technology center. He set a grueling seven-days-a-week pace, flying back and forth between Italy and the U.S. on a private plane. 
 
 A self-described workaholic, Mr. Marchionne carried a stack of up to five smartphones and wore a black sweater and jeans daily, even when visiting dignitaries and leaders such as President Donald Trump. Mr. Marchionne kept about 30 sweaters and pairs of jeans in each of his homes in Michigan, Turin and Switzerland, allowing him to travel with minimal luggage. “I have identical clothes everywhere I live. Down to the socks,” he said in a 2011 interview. 
 
 He also was known to gulp down espressos and chain-smoke Muratti brand cigarettes, a habit company officials say he gave up about a year ago. Mr. Marchionne loved playing poker on his trans-Atlantic flights, according to company officials, and he wasn’t afraid to fold early when dealt a losing hand—at the card table, or when assessing corporate strategy. 
 
 His initial plan to import Fiat models to the U.S. and use its small-car technology on Chrysler vehicles was one such example. As part of the bailout agreement with the U.S., Fiat agreed to build an American-made compact capable of getting 40 miles per gallon. But that car—the Dodge Dart—was a poor seller, an early indication U.S. consumers were moving away from sedans and into larger vehicles. 
 
 Mr. Marchionne canceled nearly all of Fiat Chrysler’s sedans for the U.S. market—including the Dart and Chrysler 200 models—and moved aggressively to retool U.S. factories to ramp up production of Jeep sport-utility vehicles and Ram pickup trucks which commanded premium prices. That move was later mimicked by Ford Motor Co. , which this spring said it would phase out nearly all U.S. sedans. General Motors Co. is expected to pare its sedan lineup as well. 
 
 A longtime proponent of auto-industry consolidation, Mr. Marchionne made waves among peers in 2015 with a 25-page PowerPoint manifesto titled “Confessions of a Capital Junkie.” In it, the CEO chided the car industry’s “value-destroying addiction to capital,” with charts and graphs showing the industry as a laggard in enterprise value and return on invested capital compared with other sectors. He challenged his fellow auto makers to consider consolidation to unlock stronger shareholder returns. 
 
 Many auto executives agreed with the unflinching assessment of their industry, but some saw Mr. Marchionne’s missive as a thinly veiled plea for a merger or acquisition partner. Indeed, within weeks of his issuing his report, he began a heretical public courtship of General Motors Co., arguing that combining the longtime rivals would provide the scale needed to survive the next downturn. 
 
 GM executives swiftly swatted down the idea, insisting the company had the size and long-term vision to go it alone. Executives from other auto makers also poured cold water on the notion of combining with Fiat Chrysler. In a June 2015 conference call with analysts, Ford finance chief Bob Shanks said such a marriage “would be doubling down on the past.” 
 
 Over the past two years as Fiat Chrysler’s fortunes turned sharply upward, Mr. Marchionne began to indicate he was prepared to have the company go it alone. By earlier this year, he said he was done looking for a merger partner. 
 
 Fiat Chrysler’s stock price nearly quadrupled over the past four years of his tenure, earning him praise from Wall Street analysts, a group that once considered his quest to resuscitate Fiat and Chrysler as doomed. During a first-quarter conference call with analysts in January, Morgan Stanley ’s Adam Jonas admitted that he was a onetime skeptic who had come around full circle. 
 
 “In 2004, when you were first introduced to the auto industry, a lot of people were thinking, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ Right? I was one of them, frankly,” Mr. Jonas said. “There are many hundreds of thousands of families across many nations that are better off because of you and your team. God bless you, Sergio. We’re never going to see anyone like you again.” 
 
 —Mike Colias and Eric Sylvers contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Chester Dawson at chester.dawson@wsj.com
– The illness and death of Fiat Chrysler's fast-charging, unconventional CEO may have seemed sudden and surprising to many, but Sergio Marchionne was apparently sick for longer than anyone—even his employer—knew. That news comes to the Wall Street Journal from University Hospital Zurich, which notes Marchionne had a "serious illness" for which he sought treatment at the hospital for more than a year. In a statement issued to get ahead of "further speculation," UHZ says it gave the ailing Marchionne "all the options offered by cutting-edge medicine," though it didn't detail what exactly he was being treated for. And because of patient privacy rules, Fiat Chrysler says it was in the dark about Marchionne's issues. "The company had no knowledge of the facts relating to Mr. Marchionne's health," a company spokesman says, per Reuters, adding it wasn't until July 20 that it "was made aware with no detail by Mr. Marchionne's family of the serious deterioration in Mr. Marchionne's condition." The reason that's important is because "material" information about a company is required to be divulged to shareholders under securities laws. Whether a high-level exec's health counts as "material" can get murky, but a company can get itself into trouble if it puts out "half-truths or inconsistent statements," a Northwestern University professor tells the Journal. In February, Fiat Chrysler's annual report noted that Marchionne's hands-on involvement in the company was "critical to the execution of our strategic direction and implementation of our business plan," reports CNNMoney.