Banker Guillermo Bueso Anduray, one of the greatest fortunes in Honduras, has joined the fever of Latin American billionaires for ultra-luxury real estate in Madrid. His silent landing, parallel to his only known investment here, the Spanish bank EBN, includes a wine company, several recently created companies and tax avoidance through the so-called ETVE, entities that hold foreign securities.
The 58-year-old magnate directs Grupo Financiero Atlántida (GFA), a conglomerate that owns Banco Atlántida, the most important in Honduras (it was founded in 1913) and which he has presided over since 2010. With some 260 offices, more than 6,000 employees, more than With 4 million clients and assets under management of some $21 billion, GFA’s tentacles include banks, insurance companies, pension funds, securities companies, tax deposits, real estate agencies and private hospitals in eight countries.
A recent journalistic investigation has linked its head with the purchase of a package of toxic debt associated with the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, stopped after the shooting murder, in 2016, of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres.
Based in Tegucigalpa, GFA operates in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador and Spain, according to its website. Years ago its owners bought Pacific Bank, one of the main banks in Belize, fixed on the EU list of tax havens until this year.
The group, which has not responded to elDiario.es, has held 9.9% of EBN in Spain since December 2021, a former investment bank for savings banks, acquired in 2015 by the deceased Catalan investor José Gracia Barba y Santiago Fernández Valbuena, former director of Telefónica. The current president of EBN, Rafael Gómez Perezagua, is a director of Invatlan, the holding company that owns GFA.
In July, the approval of the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) for GFA to buy 45% of its investment fund manager was announced. El Confidencial then assured that Atlántida was finalizing the takeover of EBN. This operation has not been completed so far.
In Spain, the Buesos and their holding company are linked to about a dozen companies, the majority created since 2022 and domiciled on Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid. Among the oldest is Corporación de Bienes y Valores Panamericanos SL, apparently inactive (its latest accounts are from 2020) and established in 2017 at Hermanos Bécquer Street, 8 in Madrid, in a building owned by the heirs of the dictator Francisco Franco.
From 2019, Inversiones Grupo Sur Altántida SL dates, which at the end of 2022, the latest accounts presented in the Commercial Registry, had about 14 million euros in assets covered by the ETVE regime.
The majority corresponded to 99.99% of four subsidiaries in Ecuador: Atlántica Casa de Valores Accitlan, Atlántida Advisors Ecuador Finatlan, Atlántica Intelligence de Mercados Interlatlan and Fiduciaria Atlántida Fidutlan. It also had another 99.67% of the Peruvian Capital Advisors, SAC. From Grupo Sur Atlántida, D-Miro, a small bank in Ecuador that they bought in March, has been hanging since this year, according to their website.
The ETVE regime dates back to 1995. It is reserved for companies based in Spain that maintain investments abroad. It exempts profits from dividends and capital gains generated by the sale of shares in foreign companies. These vehicles came back strongly in 2023. They attracted a net foreign investment of 4,356 million to Spain, compared to nearly 1,100 million in 2022, according to the Secretary of State for Commerce, which does not count this figure as “productive” investment.
The ETVE are a somewhat opaque and controversial figure, not very different from the famous “Dutch sandwich”, instrumental in Holland controlled from low-tax territories. They have been used for years by giants such as Pepsi, Walmart, Pemex or Vodafone to save hundreds of millions in taxes in other countries (especially in Latin America) using Spain as a platform, thanks to the extensive network of agreements to avoid double taxation signed with countries of the subcontinent.
Billionaires have joined this regime like the controversial ultraliberal tycoon Ricardo Salinas PliegoMexico’s third fortune, or Guillermo Bueso. Both have been featured in Bloomberg’s compilations of the 500 most influential people in Latin America. The Honduran has fallen from the last edition, published in september.
In November 2023, a joint investigation by the OCCRP investigative journalism project, which exposes corruption and organized crime, and the Columbia School of Journalism (United States) revealed that Bueso bought at a steep discount the debt associated with Agua Zarca, the hydroelectric project in the highlands of western Honduras that was opposed by the Lenca indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, shot dead in her home by three hitmen on March 2, 2016 .
The OCCRP investigation showed how the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), the main multilateral credit institution in Central America, ignored several warnings about the risks of the project by lending 24.4 million dollars to the promoter, the DESA hydroelectric plant, whose president , former intelligence officer David Castillo, was sentenced to 22 years and six months in prison in 2022 as one of the masterminds of the murder. The sentence was confirmed last Tuesday by the Supreme Court of Honduras. Among those convicted are not the owners of DESA, the Atala family, another of the richest in the country.
After the dam was paralyzed, that debt, described as “toxic” by the then president of CABEI, the controversial Honduran economist Dante Mossi, was acquired for just $500,000 by a Swiss company linked to banker Guillermo Bueso, a personal friend of Mossi.
And CABEI made a donation for that amount, half a million dollars, to promote a controversial bill on the treatment of ethnic minorities that, according to internal documents of that multilateral bank, would allow the reactivation of more than a hundred infrastructure projects that They had been paralyzed. Among them, Agua Zarca.
CABEI was then chaired by Mossi, a friend of Bueso since his university years. Denounced in September by CABEI before the US justice for corrupt practices during his mandate, Mossi was known as “the banker of dictators” for his support for authoritarian regimes in that region such as those of the Honduran Juan Orlando Hernández, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and, above all, Daniel Ortega y Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua.
Guillermo Bueso, who in his X account praises Bukele, belongs to a dynasty that has been embedded in the financial and political elite of Honduras for more than a century. In 2007, the local think tank CEDOH placed his family among the 11 that have dominated this country for decades, one of the poorest and most unequal in Latin America and the Caribbean, hit by violence and drug trafficking and with a population similar to that of Portugal.
Born in October 1966 and educated in the United States, the banker is the great-grandson of Juan Ángel Arias Boquín, who became president of Honduras at the beginning of the 20th century. His father, Guillermo Bueso Arias, presided over the Central Bank of Honduras (BCE) and held the presidency of Banco Atlántida until he died in 2009. His uncle, Jorge Bueso (died in 2023), founded Banco Mediterráneo in 1951, the third largest in the country. , was Minister of Economy and Finance, founder and governor of CABEI or presidential candidate in 1971 for the Liberal Party of Honduras, to which his grandfather was already linked. Guillermo Bueso, the banker Manuel Bueso Pineda.
Apartment in Jerónimos
Among the companies in Spain linked to Bueso is Bueso Sucesores SL, which since January 31 owns a property in Madrid within the reach of very few: an apartment with 271 square meters of constructed area and a parking space in an exclusive development in the Los Jerónimos neighborhood. It is built in a building with one home per floor, in a comprehensive rehabilitation financed with Mexican capital. Its website promotes it as “a true architectural treasure of the city whose distinguished appearance treasures within the value of luxury and comfort.”
On the property, with a value for auction purposes of 3.75 million, according to the Property Registry, there is a mortgage in favor of EBN Banco de Negocios, the Spanish entity of which Guillermo Bueso is a shareholder.
Bueso Sucesores SL was established in 2022 by the Spanish Fernando de Mergelina, president in Panama of Pacific Bank, one of the Atlántida banks. It is managed by Dulce Osorio, who since 2016 has served as “Fiduciary Administration Executive” of Banco Atlántida, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Domiciled in the offices in Castellana that manage the majority of GFA companies in Spain, Bueso Sucesores is the owner of Bodegas de Rubialejos SL, established less than two years ago and dedicated to “production, bottling and national and international marketing of wines” .
The sole administrator of Bodegas de Rubialejos SL until February was Virgilio Paredes, Honduran ambassador to South Korea until 2022, during the second term of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president who in June was sentenced in the United States to 45 years in prison for crimes. of drug trafficking.
Other recently created companies linked to the Buesos are Inversiones Atlacatl SL, Inversiones Tres Lagos SL or Pacific Ventures SL, created in May 2023. The last of them, which until September was called Chiriqui Holdings, closed 2023 with only 50,000 euros in assets. , according to the accounts signed in New York on April 2.
The home in the name of Bueso Sucesores SL in Los Jerónimos is a few meters from the super-luxury development that the Dorado-Pizzorni sold in 2021: Venezuelans of Italian-Galician origin, they face several Treasury and Social Security claims. They are exponents, along with Bueso, of that new Miami that the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, dreams of.
#Madrid #luxury #toxic #debt #murder #Berta #Cáceres #landing #richest #banker #Honduras
