Gustavo Bazzan
11/21/2020 18:20
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 11/21/2020 8:47 PM
Ezequiel Carballo will surely succeed in the presidency of Banco Macro his brother-in-law Jorge Brito, who died on Friday in a plane crash.
Carballo holds the vice presidency today, but it could be said that this rank is a
mere formality
.
Brito had 17.37% of the shares and 19.37% of the votes.
Carballo has 17.47% of the shares and 19.19% of the votes.
As you can see, a
practically total balance.
With Brito at his side, Carballo actually has long been the
daily and strategic management of the bank
.
And he does it from his favorite place within the entity:
the money table
.
Carballo is highly respected by his colleagues in the financial market, to the point that many consider him, without a hint of envy and with some admiration, a
"primus inter pares"
of the owners of the city.
The parity between Brito and Carballo was complete within the bank.
There was no distribution of power, it was shared
.
But if there was a
distribution of functions
: Brito was at this point both a banker and a politician.
Carballo, quite the opposite:
very low public profile,
but he turned to the financial business 24 hours a day.
"If there are lawyers who have the civil or criminal code in mind, I can assure you that
Ezequiel has all the Central Bank circulars in mind,
" a banker who has known him for decades commented to this newspaper.
Carballo is usually the Macro's man at the discussion tables organized by the Central Bank, both on days of peace and on days of crisis.
In many cases he helped draft circulars.
A lawyer by profession and very studious of the regulations and the strategy of his competitors in the financial system, Carballo is recognized as agile at the money tables.
“With Brito they formed the ideal duo.
One, Brito, was the bold one, the one who took risks and played hard.
Ezequiel who was dedicated to researching trends in the markets, to look for the interstices of the regulations to make money ”pointed out another banker.
The hours invested at the cash table allowed him to earn a lot of money.
To Carballo and Macro, from now on.
A former banker says: “In 2002, the dollar had exploded and until May or June it was not known what price it could reach.
In those days, Carballo made the decision to sell 200 million dollars at close to the maximum price of that time: 3.80 pesos.
Six months later, the dollar was below 3 pesos.
Short dollar, long peso ”.
He was not wrong.
Another masterful move was the purchase of
Bansud
, signed almost at the same time that the social outbreak led to the resignation of former president
Fernando De la Rúa
.
Bansud had been bought by Citibank when the US bank was still betting on retail banking in Argentina.
But
at the end of 2001 he
made the decision to get rid of the entity.
He did it in a very particular way.
Citi handed him the bank and added a capitalization of $ 200 million.
"
It was as if they had been given a winning lottery ticket,"
said an old innkeeper.
Some time later, former Citi executives landed on the Macro board, and they still occupy chairs there, such as
Guillermo Stanley and Carlos Giovanelli.
The division of tasks was decisive for the growth of the bank.
Brito wove relationships with politics at the highest level, especially with
governors
, and that was crucial.
From the process of concentration of the financial sector and the privatization of the provincial banks, the Macro was able to advance on the public banks of
Misiones, Salta, Jujuy and Tucumán.
Brito was the ace to negotiate purchases, Carballo the brain that worked in silence so that these absorptions did not collide with the "culture" of the Macro and the digestion of the new incorporations was harmonious.
But it wasn't just a question of assembling parts.
The provincial banking business gave Macro fuel to grow by leaps and bounds.
Among the various explanations of this process, one fundamental: the Macro inherited the functions of
"financial administrator"
of the provinces where it landed.
In other words, the Macro handled the silver of the provinces.
And something no less.
The money from the salaries of
provincial public employees
passes through the bank
.
It happens that as a financial agent, the bank has at its disposal the payroll of public employees, the salary accounts and, above all, the direct line with each employee to offer a loan (personal, pledge, mortgage when they are viable), a credit card credit...
The particularity of these credits is that they are granted with the precious
"discount code"
: the bank collects the fee before the monthly salary reaches the employee's account.
Zero risk of bad debts.
For this reason, the forecasts that you have to make are very low.
The dream of a banker.
Obtain silver at zero rate to lend it at a good interest rate.
Nobody other than Macro has the discount code in the provinces where it operates as a financial agent.
In some sense, the model was followed by the
Eskenazi
family
,
who act as financial agent in Santa Cruz, San Juan, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos.
The personal relationships
between Brito and Carballo
were not always harmonious
.
In fact, there were tensions and the risk of rupture during the second term of Cristina Kirchner.
During those years, the
ANSeS
exercised its stock rights (inherited after the nationalization of the AFJPs) and placed shareholders in representation of
28.8%
of the shares it owns in Macro.
In fact, on behalf of the ANSeS,
Roberto Feletti
and, until December 2019,
Ramiro Tosi,
current Secretary of Finance of the cabinet of the Minister of Economy, Martin Guzmán,
passed through that board
.
Returning to the tensions between the partners, Carballo took a license from the bank between 2012 and 2016. In the middle there was talk of separating assets.
The operation came to a halt when they concluded that with this division the
ANSeS would become the main shareholder.
During those years of work leave, Carballo divided his time between
Punta del Este and Paris
, where he devoted himself to studying
financial economics
.
He has a flat near the Argentine embassy in one of the most elegant areas of the French capital.
Walking alongside Brito in the business world since 1978, Carballo is also shareholders of the various companies that were created over the years, in agricultural, real estate and energy investments.
But not everything is always up.
Banco Macro reached a market value close to
8,000 million dollars in October 2017
.
From there it was a slope, accelerated by the devaluations of 2018 and by the plummet of August 12, 2020,
the Monday following STEP.
Today the Macro is worth, at dollar value counted with liquid,
800 million dollars.
Although Macro opened its capital and its shares are listed here and on Wall Street, the bank did not lose its family imprint and the presence of the surnames Brito and Carballo continues on the board of directors with children of both: Jorge Pablo and Constanza (sons of Jorge Brito) sit next to Delfín Federico Ezequiel (Carballo's son).
Now the helm of the flagship will remain in the hands of Carballo, although at the small table
the founding surnames will continue to share power: Brito and Carballo.
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