When Carlos Bulgheroni was 28 years old, doctors diagnosed him
with cancer and said he only had five months to live. He defied all
expectations but his time finally came September 3, when, at age 71 he died
at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was recovering from
surgery.
In the years since his first diagnosis, he and his brother,
Alejandro, built a business empire based on the oil business that turned them
into Argentina’s richest men. Forbes estimated the net worth
of the Bulgheroni brothers at US$4.8 billion, ranking the pair as the 324th richest in the
world.
The brothers didn’t exactly make their wealth out of nothing,
but they took the company they inherited from their father, Bridas Corp., and
turned it into a global player in energy. Throughout the years, it was Carlos
who was seen as the real driver of the company’s oil business, the tireless
worker who had an uncanny ability to lobby and make friends in the country’s
ever-changing political landscape. He was a great ally to President Raúl
Alfonsín in the 1980s before becoming a huge supporter of Carlos Menem in the
1990s and, despite a bit of a rough start with Néstor Kirchner in 2003, became
one of the few business leaders who was there in person to hear Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner’s inaugural speech in 2007.
It was this drive to seal deals that is often credited with
turning Bridas, which was once mainly a supplier to national oil company YPF, into
a key oil producer. The Bulgheronis ended up selling 50 percent of Bridas to
China’s influential state-owned oil company Cnooc in 2010 for US$3.1 billion.
For its part, Bridas owns 40 percent of Pan American Energy (PAE), the company
that operates the country’s largest oil field (Cerro Dragón) and is second only
to YPF in terms of production. And in 2012, Bridas bought Esso’s assets in Argentina,
which it renamed Axion, making the company an important player in the retail
fuel sector as well.
Even as he was politically savvy at home, Bulgheroni also looked
abroad toward opportunities in the energy sector that opened up in Asia after
the iron curtain came tumbling down. One of the most iconic photos of Carlos
Bulgheroni shows him sitting in the desert, negotiating with the Taliban
to build a pipeline through Afghanistan in 1994. The significance of that photo
goes well beyond Argentina’s borders as it confirms how Carlos
Bulgheroni effectively became the first Western business leader to
negotiate directly with the Taliban. The pipeline never became a reality as the
Taliban took Kabul in September 1996 and assassinated the president. The photo only
came to light years later, when Clarín published it in September,
1997.
Photos via Clarín
From The Bubble
