Privatization Profiteers from Pinochet’s Chile May Yet Face Prison
Privatization Profiteers from Pinochet’s Chile May Yet Face Prison
by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
September 19th, 2013
Julio Ponce, the billionaire owner of Sociedad Quimica & Minera de Chile (SQM), faces ten years in prison for insider trading. A beneficiary of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Ponce is charged with buying company shares at below market prices and selling them at a profit.
SQM – often referred to as Soquimich - is one of the world’s biggest producers of potassium nitrate, iodine and lithium which it produces with raw materials sourced from its caliche ore and brine mines in the Atacama desert. Originally a state enterprise, SQM was privatized by Pinochet in 1988 at the bargain basement price of $120 million on the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The man in charge of privatization in Chile was Ponce, who trained as a forestry engineer, but had the good fortune of marrying Veronica Pinochet, the daughter of the president. Pinochet appointed Ponce to the board of SQM before it was privatized.
“Call it business savvy plus political connections on overdrive,” writes Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine.
Ponce became president of the privatized nitrate company in 1987. Several of his relatives became major stockholders and had positions on the board of directors of the company.
More:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15871
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