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| Carlos Pellas and his wife Vivian were both severely injured in a 1989 plane crash that inspired them to open a children's burn center (Photo: Joe Pugliese/Bloomberg Markets) |
Carlos Pellas, CEO of the Pellas Group, is Nicaragua's first billionaire. He runs a 20-company conglomerate that encompasses, sugar, rum, insurance and real estate.
By Blake Schmidt
Bloomberg News
Photographer: Joe Pugliese/Bloomberg Markets
When the guerrilla army of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, led by Daniel Ortega, took over Nicaragua in 1979, one of its first acts was to seize the assets of the country’s business oligarchs.
One target was the Pellas family, prominent since Francisco Alfredo Pellas, who arrived in Nicaragua from Italy in 1875, got rich by producing sugar and operating steamships on Lake Nicaragua. The FSLN seized the family’s real estate and its bank, Banco America, and later took over its sugar mill, the biggest business in the country, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its December issue.
The Pellases commuted between Nicaragua and Miami during the eight-year Contra war, which pitted supporters of the old regime against Ortega’s army. That conflict ended in 1987 in an agreement brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. Carlos Pellas, Francisco’s great-grandson, then 34, started rebuilding the family fortune -- a process that was violently interrupted in 1989, when Carlos and his wife, Vivian, were almost killed in a plane crash.
Between surgeries, Pellas worked quietly to recover his sugar mill, which he did in 1992, when President Violeta Chamorro, a distant relative, returned expropriated properties to their original owners. Pellas helped start a new bank, BAC-Credomatic, which, by 2005, was one of the largest financial institutions in Central America. Its sale to General Electric Co. (GE) was completed between 2005 and 2010 for about $1.7 billion.
Today, privately held Grupo Pellas runs four sugar mills, produces ethanol and provides the raw material for Pellas’s Flor de Cana brand of rum. The group controls more than 20 companies, with stakes in media, distribution, insurance, citrus, health care and auto dealerships. It boasts $1.5 billion in annual sales -- equal to 13 percent of Nicaragua’s gross domestic product -- and employs some 18,000 people. Carlos, 61, the major shareholder, is Nicaragua’s first billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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