Today, privately held Grupo Pellas runs four sugar mills, produces ethanol and provides the raw material for Pellas’s Flor de Cana brand of rum. The group controls more than 20 companies, with stakes in media, distribution, insurance, citrus, health care and auto dealerships. It boasts $1.5 billion in annual sales -- equal to 13 percent of Nicaragua’s gross domestic product -- and employs some 18,000 people. Carlos, 61, the major shareholder, is Nicaragua’s first billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Being skeptical of businessmen who make their money off sugar and who are able to amass a fortune under Somoza, the Sandinistas, Chamorro, Alemán, Bolaños, and Ortega again, I wish the author had dug just a bit deeper.
You can read the author's August article on Guatemala's first billionaire Mario Lopez Estrada here.
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