“The Cardinal,” they called him, for his Christian faith and also for his clerical prudence. But the circumspection, the silent reserve of his private life, cultivated during decades of silence and low profile, coexisted with the excessiveness of his weakness for high-end cars, for horses. And for business, the big companies that led him to be one of the richest men in Argentina and the world. Until this Friday, when Gregorio Pérez Companc died at the age of 89.
Food company owner Río de la Plata Mills and the oil company PeCom, Goyo Pérez Companc became a powerful businessman as a result of a history of investments and changes in the sector that, in a parable that unites energy and agribusiness, is a symbol of the Argentine economy of the last 50 years.
Born in Buenos Aires on August 23, 1934, his parents, of humble origins, gave him up for adoption at the age of 11, according to the official version. He was adopted by the marriage of the French Margarita Companc de Pérez Acuña and Ramón Pérez Acuña. The family had a firm dedicated to sheep and in the mid-1940s he turned to the shipping industry. A decade later, the investment expanded with the San Jorge Forestry Establishment and, later, with the Pérez Companc Oil Company. Gregorio Pérez Companc’s business journey began there, in the shipping sector and then in the energy sector.
With his imprint, the group that expanded and diversified in the areas of construction, oil exploitation and refining, gas transportation and distribution, as well as finance, and would grow as a State contractor in the seventies, especially of the oil company YPF, and taking advantage of the privatizations of state companies in the nineties, especially in telecommunications (Telecom) and electricity (Edesur). The conglomerate was a pioneer in the shopping center business in Argentina, with Shopping Alto Palermo, and elevated one of the country’s largest private banks, Banco Río, today in the hands of the Spanish group Santander. At the end of the last century, the Pérez Companc group took control and reorganized Molinos Río de la Plata, established as one of the dominant companies in the production of foods for mass consumption.
In addition to making money by the millions, the group led by Goyo Pérez Companc also became, through a foundation, one of the largest sources of donations in the country. In a generous portion, directed to institutions linked to the Catholic cult, and in particular to Opus Dei.
The marriage he formed in 1964 with María del Carmen Sundblad Beccar Varela had eight children, some of whom today are at the head of the family business conglomerate, Pérez Companc Family Group.
The discretion with which he surrounded his private life had some exceptions. Like that time in the late nineties when he was seen with a Ferrari that had cost him more than $600,000. His fleet of luxury vehicles included other machines from the Italian team, a hundred Ford models, a Porche 911, a Chevrolet Camaro and even an airplane, a Boeing 737, among others. On the rural ranches of the Pérez Companc family, another family passion developed in parallel, the breeding of purebred horses.
Death found him and his group in 809th place in the magazine’s ranking. Forbes of the wealthiest people on the planet, with a fortune estimated at 3.9 billion dollars. Only three local businessmen appear above that list: Marcos Galperín (owner of Mercado Libre), Paolo Rocca (Techint) and Alejandro Bulgheroni (Pan American Energy).
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