Billionaire Family Pledges $125 Million Stake in Office Firm
Billionaire Family Pledges $125 Million Stake in Office Owner
(Bloomberg) -- The billionaire Santo Domingo family has pledged a major chunk of its $260 million holding in Spanish real estate company Inmobiliaria Colonial Socimi SA, leveraging one of its biggest listed assets.
Investment firms controlled by Colombia’s richest family have now pledged about half of the 29 million shares they own in Colonial, filings show. Those are valued at about $125 million, based on Tuesday’s closing stock price, and include 3 million shares committed in the first quarter, when Colonial tumbled amid fallout from the coronavirus crisis.
The pandemic has had a “material impact” on the value of publicly traded investments, Bevco Lux Sarl, the Luxembourg-based firm owned by the Santo Domingo family that manages its Colonial stake, said in its consolidated results.
The transactions offer a glimpse at how the rich leverage assets for liquidity. Among the mega-wealthy, Elon Musk has used shares in Tesla Inc. to obtain personal loans, while Larry Ellison has put up millions of Oracle Corp. equities to fund a lavish lifestyle. In the early stages of the pandemic, many wealthy investors had to meet margin calls on pledged shares as markets plunged.
A Bevco spokesman declined to comment, while a spokesman for Colonial didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Led by scion Alejandro, the Santo Domingos are the third-largest shareholders of Colonial, which has assets of about 12.2 billion euros ($14.5 billion) and owns office buildings in Spain and France. The family has already pledged more than a third of its 5% stake in Budweiser-maker Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, valued at about $6 billion. It also owns stock in Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.
Colonial shares were little changed at 3:43 p.m. in Madrid trading.
Read more: Billionaire Santo Domingo Clan Plans to Sell Some Keurig Shares
The Santo Domingos sold their holdings in Bavaria -- once Colombia’s biggest beermaker -- to British brewer SAB Miller for stock in 2005 and now own a stake in AB InBev, which acquired its U.K. rival in 2016. They’ve used the proceeds to invest in areas including banking, private equity and real estate. The family has a net worth of about $11 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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