20000310-It's not easy to be an entrepreneur in Spain

Aldo Olcese, president of the investment company Fincorp, explained to students of Economics and Business Studies at the University of Navarra the operation to purchase a 30% stake in Telepizza, one of the leading brands in the fast food sector in our country. The businessman reflected on the ins and outs of the operation which took place five months ago and which involved a disbursement of some 50,000 million pesetas.

The well-known investor and businessman, who is Adjunct Professor of the School of Economics at the University of Navarra, began his speech by asking the students in attendance about their perception of the Telepizza company. Of all the terms that were mentioned, "volatile" was the one that Olcese himself accepted as the most appropriate to describe the company's status in October, when the financial transaction took place.

The speaker alerted listeners to the peculiarities of the purchase of the shares from Leopoldo Fernández Pujals, which made it "a complex operation", in Olcese's own words. The businessman highlighted, in the first place, the fact that in this operation, a small competitor such as Telechef approached one of enormous dimensions such as Telepizza. Another of the most original aspects of this purchase centered on the fact that the transaction was carried out in cash, something not very common. Finally, Fincorp's chairman highlighted the large issue of foreign institutional investors that had been involved in the transaction. This was precisely one of the arguments that Olcese used to criticize some aspects of the Spanish business and financial world. "At the time of finalizing the deal, we were frustrated by the fact that we had almost no Spanish institutional investors (one out of thirty). Unfortunately," Olcese commented, "economic power in our country is in very few hands and very 'banked', so it is difficult to be an entrepreneur in Spain".

In the opinion of speaker, the most complex aspect of the acquisition was the "conflict of interest". Since the transaction involved a exchange of properties and interests, the National Securities Market Commission and the purchasers defined, by common agreement, some controls. In order to comply with them, and to guarantee the total transparency of the operation, the new majority owners followed a regulated procedure that had as result the recognition of the CNMV and the perfect completion of the purchase.