For a man steeped in family honour, there is a rueful irony in the fact that it was a dynastic feud that ultimately proved instrumental in bringing down Ricardo Salgado and the Espírito Santo name.
In 2001, one of the country’s leading businessmen and a long-standing associate of the Espírito Santo clan, the industrialist Pedro Queiroz Pereira, first became aware of intriguing movements in the share registers of companies around his family’s corporate jewel, Semapa, which dominates Portugal’s pulp, paper and concrete industries.
‘Pequepe’ or PQP, as he is known to the Portuguese, had noticed that a stake in a key holding company of his empire was acquired by what appeared to be a Luxembourg shelf company called Mediterranean, which was represented in official filings by a nominee company owned by Ricardo Salgado’s Banco Espírito Santo.
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Pedro Queiroz Pereira was lawyered up, hurling legal volleys at Salgado by dusting off his clan’s long-standing position as a shareholder in the Espírito Santo entities |
The Espírito Santos and the Queiroz Pereiras have long been the titans of Portugal Inc. They have a shared history over decades of doing deals, and often with each other, at the intoxicating nexus where business acumen meets proximity to power, most significantly as the financiers and builders of dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo regime, which ruled Portugal from 1932 beyond Salazar’s death in 1970 to the toppling of his successor Marcello Caetano in the Carnation Revolution of 1974.
