Three investment funds and the “Mexican shark” of Wall Street, the largest shareholders of Banco Sabadell

The Catalan group’s shares are divided largely equally between investment funds and minority investors. In other Spanish Ibex 35 companies there is usually at least one controlling shareholder whose stake exceeds 5-10% of the share capital, but in this case such a figure does not exist.

In Sabadell’s case, the closest investors to the big ones are three investment funds and a Mexican millionaire who deserves his own chapter because of his position in the bank. BlackRock

, the world’s largest investment fund manager and the first investor in the Ibex 35, holds a 3.6% stake, adding its positions and derivatives; He is the shareholder with the highest stake in Sabadell.

In third place is Sizing Fund Consultants with just over 3%. And in fourth place is the Millennium Group with a share of just under 2%, which just yesterday slightly reduced its stake in the Catalan bank due to the liquidation of a derivative financial instrument.

These are investment funds, primarily based in the US, that seek profitability and do not interfere with the day-to-day management of the companies in which they invest, without seeking board positions.

The figure is a completely different matter. David Martinez Guzman, the second largest shareholder of the Catalan bank, as well as its own director on the group’s highest management body. His figure, however, is a mystery to the general population and part of the market, since he is a man who hardly appears in public and has almost no images of himself. Even, as reported in the media, he even hired a company to erase his traces from the Internet.

Financial sources characterize him as a business shark. He is one of the richest men in Latin America, a native of Mexico, but his activities take him further north than his country of origin. He lives in New York and is the richest Mexican on Wall Street.

An investor by profession. It owns the Fintech Advisory group, whose subsidiaries it bets on around the world. He has been dubbed Argentina’s richest man because he has recently been one of the country’s rescuers.

He has or had contacts with companies such as Alfa, Vitro, Cemex, Clarín… and Banco Sabadell, where he arrived about ten years ago to participate in capital raising as an institutional investor. In Catalonia, according to those who know him, he is a valuable and respected man, as well as intelligent. It is curious that at that time he was part of the Legionaries of Christ.

The Power of Oliu

Apart from the composition of Sabadell’s shareholders, the truth is that the figure of the president Josep Oliu This goes a long way to the core of what a bank is.

He usually receives most of the voting delegations of minority shareholders because he has been the man in the house for decades. Shareholders trust him, according to financial sources, although now, at 75, he is increasingly asked about his possible retirement.

Likewise, market sources indicate that Sabadell’s minority shareholders include many SMEs and individual clients; They are shareholders and customers at the same time. And they directly indicate that they are Catalan shareholders, very Catalan, who would not welcome the disappearance of “their” enterprise.

The task of BBVA de Torres in these months will be to try to convince the funds, the Mexicans and those Catalan shareholders who can resist the most. The takeover clock is already ticking.