Gregorio Pérez Companc

Gregorio "Goyo" Pérez Companc (* 12. October 1934 in Buenos Aires , often incorrectly Pérez ) is an Argentine entrepreneur who in the list of billionaires of the Forbes Magazine is out. On the 2009 list, he was ranked 379th of the richest in the world with an estimated net worth of $ 1.8 billion.

Life

Perez Companc's origins are the subject of speculation. Although his birth certificate has never been traced, it is certain that he was born in 1934. According to information from the book "Los Dueños de la Argentina" by Luis Majul , he was registered on August 23, 1945 with the name Jorge Gregorio Bazán as the legitimate son of Benito Bazán and Juana Emiliana Molina. But Majul also reports that other sources say he is a biological son of Ramón Perez Acuña with a domestic servant. He was apparently adopted in 1946 by his wife Margarita Companc de Perez or recognized as a son. Perez Companc attended the Colegio La Salle in Buenos Aires, but was considered a poor student and was not accepted as equals by his siblings Jorge Joaquín, Carlos and Alicia , the biological children of Perez Acuña and Companc. In contrast, Companc de Perez determined on her deathbed that he would have equal rights with his siblings.

Most of the time he lived in seclusion on a hacienda of his adoptive mother, where he devoted himself to cattle and dairy farming, while his siblings, especially Carlos, managed the family business. Gregorio was considered unsuitable for business life. In 1961 he married María Carmen "Munchi" Sundblad, with whom he has seven children (Margarita, Jorge, Rosario, Pilar, Cecilia, Pablo and Luis); his eldest daughter died in a car accident in the Patagonia region in 1984 at the age of 19 .

After the death of his stepbrother Carlos in 1977, his sister Alicia took him on to the management. (Her brother Jorge Joaquín had already died in 1959.) Since the company was mainly active in the energy industry, good political contacts and discreet behavior were important qualities Gregorio brought with him to run the business in the 1980s. The company benefited in particular from its good contacts in the context of the privatization of state-owned companies under Carlos Menem (see below). Since Alicia died in 1998 and none of his siblings left children, Gregorio and his family are now the sole owners of the group.

Perez Companc appears very rarely and conveys the image of an ascetic, thrifty person who has built a great distance from most of the other Argentine business leaders who are present in the social press through celebrations. It is reported that he attends Catholic services every day. He donated significant sums for especially Catholic social projects and institutions of Opus Dei , including between 50 and 80 million pesos (at the time with a fixed exchange rate of 1: 1 to the US dollar ) for the Pilar campus (with university clinic) in Buenos Aires operated by Opus Dei Universidad Austral . His company and the Perez Companc Foundation have also contributed to making the Universidad Católica Argentina one of the most prestigious universities in Argentina.

He is considered a supporter of CA River Plate and collects old cars. Among other things, in 2007 he acquired the Ferrari 330TRI / LM from 1962, with which Phil Hill and Olivier Gendebien won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1962 , a Ferrari 340/375 MM Berlinetta and a 340MM . He also owns a Ferrari F50 and a Ferrari Enzo Ferrari . He is planning a car museum with his collection.

His sons are active in car racing : Jorge and Luis take part in the World Rally Championship with the Munchis World Rally Team . Her brother Pablo competed in 2007 as a rookie in the Indy Pro Series of the Indy Racing League , but injured his legs very badly in an accident in his first race at Homestead-Miami Speedway in March , so that he for the rest of the championship failed and will no longer contest a formula race because his legs were too badly damaged by injury and 14 operations.

His wife, like Gregorio Perez Companc and his adoptive mother, has roots in agriculture. For many years she was chairwoman of the Argentine Federation for Jersey Cattle . Since the 1990s, she built a small chain of ice cream parlors called Munchi's that sell ice cream made entirely from the milk of Jersey cattle. The chain's head office is located in Belén de Escobar in the province of Buenos Aires , where the family also lives and owns an estate of 262 hectares. The family's cattle ranch and another Munchi Sundblad project are also located here: Temaikén , a large private zoo ( biopark ) run by a foundation , in which the animals are not in cages.

The family also owns land in Patagonia, including Puerto San Julián , which is also farmed and has a gold and silver mine in which the family is involved, and 60,000 hectares of forest in the Misiones province (near the Iguaçu Waterfalls ) and 100,000 hectares of pine and eucalyptus forests in the Corrientes province and 10,000 hectares of willow and poplar forests in the Paraná delta .

Companies

Pérez Companc's group of companies, Grupo Perez Companc SA , is the largest in Argentina.

It was created in 1946 when the brothers Carlos and Jorge Joaquín Perez Companc, with the compensation of a land expropriation and with the support of representatives of the Catholic Action and the Benedictine Abbot of Buenos Aires in the United States, bought four ships with which they set up a sea transport company that routes served between Buenos Aires and southern Argentina. In 1959, under President Arturo Frondizi , the company obtained a petroleum concession, which formed the basis for the reorientation of the company, which subsequently prospered, supported by good relationships with various governments. In the Menem era (1989–1999), when Gregorio Perez Companc was already active in the company's management, the group acquired significant shares in state-owned companies such as the San Lorenzo oil refinery , Transportadora de Gas del Sur and a stake in Telecom Argentina .

His sons Jorge and Luis have been in charge of the group since the 1990s . Jorge has been the official vice president of PC Holding since 1997 . Under his leadership, with advice from McKinsey, the group was restructured, including the sale of most of the holdings acquired in the course of the privatizations under Menem, including the holdings in Telecom Argentina, Telefónica de Argentina, shopping centers and hotels and Metrogás . The most significant sale was the majority stake in the bank Banco del Río de la Plata , which was sold to Banco Santander in 1997 . A remainder of 18.5% went to Merrill Lynch in 2000 .

Initially, the strategy was to make the oil business the core area of ​​the holding company. However, since oil prices fell in the second half of the 1990s , competition in the oil sector increased worldwide and the company was outbid by the Spanish Repsol when it took over YPF , this strategy was changed. The oil and energy company PeCom Energía was initially not sold, despite offers from Shell, Enron and others. In 2002 the majority of PeCom Energía was finally sold to the Brazilian company Petrobras . The decision is said to have been made largely within the family, with Perez Companc's wife being of great importance.

When the sons joined the group, the three previously leading managers and consultants, Roque Maccarone , Eduardo Casabal and Oscar Vicente , gradually left the group.

The group used the proceeds from the sale of its holdings to acquire several food companies, including Molinos Río de la Plata , which it acquired in 1999 for approximately $ 380 million. The agricultural and agro-industrial sector is therefore currently the focus of the Perez Companc group. In 2001, the Agriculture subgroup included ten agro-industrial operations with more than 87,000 hectares of land, on which cattle and dairy farming are carried out and wheat, maize, soy, sunflowers and rice are grown.

Fundación Perez Companc

The family foundation Fundación Perez Companc , which was founded by their children in memory of Margarita Companc and has also been subordinate to Gregorio Perez Companc since the death of his sister Alicia, does work for charitable purposes, among other things. However, it was / is also the owner of part of the assets and interests of the Perez Companc Group and receives (s) dividends and other profit-sharing from them.

However, in June 2004, with retroactive effect to April 29, 1988, the Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos (AFIP), the Argentine Federal Tax Office, denied the exemption from profit tax, which is why "hundreds of millions of pesos" were reclaimed in tax savings. The reasoning was that the foundation as a financial holding company had worked, people who, for Perez Companc were consolidated bonuses have been paid and transferred investments abroad. Accordingly, the foundation acted as a “holding in disguise” under tax law. It was the largest among a number of other Argentine holdings with a comparable model. The chairman of the foundation, Carlos Cupi , contradicted this and stated that the profits received by the Perez Companc group were used for social causes such as the Fleni health center, the Universidad Austral and Temaikén. More recent findings in the case could not be found for this article.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Jorge Camarasa, Un millonario que va por más , La Nación , February 1, 1999 (Spanish)
2. ↑ Luis Majul, Los dueños de la Argentina, Volume 2: Goyo Pérez Companc, Santiago Soldati, Aldo Roggio, Enrique Menotti Pescarmona , Ed. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1994, 950-07-0976-7, und ders., Gregorio Perez Companc  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Revista PODER , August 28, 2001 (Spanish)  
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Luis Majul, Gregorio Perez Companc  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Revista PODER , August 28, 2001 (Spanish)  
4. ↑ Sergio Danishewsky, Dos argentinas, entre las más ricas , Clarín , July 17, 2000 (Spanish)
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Rubén Navarro, Como se hacen las grandes fortunas en Sudamerica , Contenido, May 1, 2002 (Spanish)
6. ↑ David Cufré, Dueño de un cuarto del apagón , Página / 12 , February 28, 1999 (Spanish)
7. ↑ Patricio Ayala, Pérez Companc, compró los tres autos más caros del año ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , topspeed.es, November 30, 2007 (Spanish) 
8. ↑ Pablo Pérez Companc prepara su 2008 ( Memento of March 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), January 3, 2008 (Spanish)
9. ↑ Gregorio Perez Companc ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , AeroVIP Flyer 13, 2004 (Spanish) 
10. ↑ ^{a b c d} Pablo Ferreira, Los misterios de Gregorio Perez Companc  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Página 1/2, Supplement Cash , May 2, 1999 (Spanish)  
11. ↑ Guillermo Sánchez-Herrero, Botín se convierte en el mayor banquero privado de Argentina , El Mundo , May 28, 1997 (Spanish)
12. ↑ La historia secreta de la mayor venta del año , Clarín , July 28, 2002 (Spanish)
13. ↑ Martín Kanenguiser, Eliminan un beneficio fiscal a Perez Companc , La Nación , June 24, 2004 (Spanish), the text of the corresponding General Resolution 1692 can be found here

Web links

• Luis Majul, Gregorio Perez Companc , Revista PODER , August 28, 2001 (Spanish)
• Pablo Ferreira, Los misterios de Gregorio Perez Companc , Página 1/2 , Supplement Cash , May 2, 1999 (Spanish)
• Jorge Camarasa, Un millonario que va por más , La Nación , February 1, 1999 (Spanish)
• Rubén Navarro, Como se hacen las grandes fortunas en Sudamerica , Contenido, May 1, 2002 (Spanish)