António de Sommer Champalimaud

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António de Sommer Champalimaud (19 March 1918 – 8 May 2004) was a Portuguese banker and industrialist that in 2004 was the wealthiest man in Portugal. He earned his fortune with insurance, banking and cement industries only to have his companies nationalized after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. After living in exile in Brazil for seven years, he returned to Portugal and rebuilt his companies.

[edit] Biography

Born in 1918, he attended the La Guardia jesuit high school before enrolling at the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa to study chemistry. António never finished his college education, for at 19, after his father's death, he took over the family's construction company. Later, at the age of 28 he took over his uncle's (Henrique Sommer) cement business. He developed both companies into large corporations.

In 1941 he married Maria Cristina de Mello. They had seven children together. Maria was an heir to the Grupo CUF, a company that once controlled 70% of the tobacco market in Portugal. They were divorced by 1957, after which he started competing with his ex-brother-in-law in the banking and insurance markets.

He bequeathed half a billion euros to establish the Champalimaud Foundation in order to support biomedicine. The foundation also administers a yearly 1 million euro prize for outstanding research related to vision, an appropriate prize, as late in life António lost his eyesight.

[edit] Business

Champalimaud expanded the cement business he took over from his uncle in 1946 and expanded it in Portugal to the point of a near monopoly. He also expanded his cement industry into Africa, to Angola and Mozambique.

In the early 1960s he bought the Banco Pinto & Sotto Mayor (BPSM) and the insurance companies Confiança, Mundial and Continental Resseguros. In 1969 he fled to Mexico to avoid an arrest warrant related to an inheritance case over shares of the Empresa de Cimentos de Leiria, his uncle's old company. The warrant was revoked in 1973, after which Champalimaud returns to Portugal.

In 1975, a year after the Carnation Revolution, his companies were nationalized by the new government. Champalimaud first fleed to France and ultimately to Brazil. Without his fortune, he restarted building his wealth, first establishing a cement company in Brazil, and later by also operating commercial farms. In 1992, Champalimaud returned to Portugal and started to buy back his old companies.

In a series of transactions, Champalimaud sold the Champalimaud Group to the Banco Santander Central Hispano, BSCH, Spain's largest bank as of 2004.