Piñera’s B-side: voracious billionaire with businesses in the stock market, aviation, TV and soccer

The former president of Chile, Sebastian Piñerawho died this Tuesday when the helicopter he was piloting crashed, left a deep mark in politics but also in the world of finance, where he was known as a stock market “shark”, a voracious businessman who accumulated a fortune of more than of 2.8 billion dollars, according to the Forbes list.

Stock market, airline services, the television business and even football, where he managed ‘Blanco y Negro’, the concessionaire that manages Colo Colo, the most successful club in Chiliare part of the tentacles of Piñera – whose brother was an important economic figure during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989) -, which appear in one way or another in all spheres of Chilean society and economy.

Graduated as a commercial engineer from the Catholic University of Chile, and with a postgraduate degree in Economics from Harvard University in the United States, Piñera began to amass his fortune in the world of construction with Constructora Toltén, a company that he founded in 1975 and sold. before 1980 to push their investments in the stock market.

Driven by the contacts of his brother, who helped implement the ultraliberal system that has ruled Chile ever since with the invention of AFPa group of six private companies that manage the country’s pension funds, the young Piñera who arrived from the United States navigated quickly through the privileged waters of the dictatorship as an advisor in institutions such as the ECLAC and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The Sanhattan Lions

One of those contacts provided him with the springboard to jump into the world of the stock market and banking, where he became one of the main ‘Lions of Sanhattan’, the financial district with tall buildings in the style of the well-known district of New York, built in the north of Santiago de Chili.

In 1979 he achieved exclusive representation for the country of Visa and Mastercard credit cards and created Bancard SA, and concentrated on betting on the stock market, with a very particular and aggressive air, according to the book ‘Piñera y los leones de Sanhattan’ , by the Chilean writer Sergio Jara Román.

From banking and the stock market he began to build his empire: at the beginning of the 1980s, he became one of the founders of CMB SA, a well-known fund manager with a broad portfolio of institutional investors, and achieved representation of Apple in Chile, according to its website.

But its true economic takeoff came from the hands of ‘Citicorp-Chile’, a powerful investment fund manager. foreign capital investmentof which he was general manager and president between 1980 and 1987, a time of crisis in the dictatorship but also of affirmation of the ultraliberal experiment of the ‘Chicago Boys’, in which his brother, José Piñera Echenique, actively participated.

In those years of privatization in which the ‘Lions of Sanhattan’ appropriated the country’s finances and resources, Piñera also participated as a partner in the real estate companies Las Américas SA and Aconcagua, the postal company Postal Market and Editorial Los Andes. , among other businesses.

The decade of privatizations

In the 1990s, with the Pinochet dictatorship over and the transition to democracy underway, it was a promising second land for pineapple and his companions from Sanhattan.

The former president opted for aviation and in 1994 he took control of LAN Chile, the Chilean airline privatized in 1989, by purchasing 16% of the new company together with the Cueto family. Piñera sold his shares when he became president in 2010, the year in which he merged with Tam Brasil and created LATAM, one of the largest airline companies in America.

But his financial voracity did not stop there: throughout that turn of the century and according to an article from the Library of National Congress, he invested in various real estate projects such as the Curauma Industrial Park, in the coastal city of Valparaíso, in the national telecommunications company. Entel -also privatized- and the AntarChile holding company and the Calichera company, in addition to the Compañía Sudamericana de Vapores and Colbún, an electrical company created during a dictatorship and also privatized during a democracy.

Football and television

In the first decade of the 21st century, Piñera’s eyes fell on football and television. In 2005 he bought Chilevisión, a television channel with a nationwide presence and invested in ‘Blanco y Negro’”, the concessionaire that manages Colo Colo, the most successful and richest club in Chili.

There he shared a table and maneuvers with another of the great ‘Lions of Sanhattan’, the financier Larrain Vial, and billionaires like him from another sector. At the same time, he invested in the Ahumada Farmacias chain and through companies bought securities in companies in a variety of sectors, including energy.

In 2009, and in view of the fact that the political race towards the Government Palace was already beginning to be more promising, he prepared to assume the Presidency of the Republic: he transferred all his participation in publicly held companies while the company Bancard was left in charge. of managing his businesses abroad, the rest of his empire, of an influential and powerful man, both in politics and in the world of money.