“ Abilio Diniz was an adventurer of a thousand lives, exceptional entrepreneur, high-level sportsman, man of media and culture. » Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour, paid tribute to the Brazilian administrator of the distributor, who died on Sunday at the age of 87. Peninsula, his family company, owns 8.8% of Carrefour.
The remains of Abilio Diniz, legend of Brazilian capitalism, were exhibited at the Morumbis stadium, that of São Paulo Futebol Clube, his favorite team. Abilio was the son of Valentim Diniz, a Portuguese emigrant who landed in Rio de Janeiro in 1929, who chose the city’s emblem, Sugar Loaf (Pão de Açucar), to name his bakery. Abilio was famous both for leading Grupo Pao de Açucar (GPA), one of the first local distributors, and for overcoming a seven-day kidnapping by a Chilean revolutionary movement in late 1989. The man who had made sport one of the six pillars of its success, with balanced diet, stress control, self-knowledge, love and faith, became known in France in the spring of 2011.
To escape the takeover of GPA by Casino, of which he was an ally, he then mounted an attempted capitalistic “coup d’état” with the two first shareholders of Carrefour at the time. Called Gama, the operation provided for the merger of Carrefour Brazil and GPA. Thanks to the defense of Jean-Charles Naouri, CEO and largest shareholder of Casino, the Gama operation had collapsed. It took the intervention of a former FARC negotiator to seal the divorce between Casino and Abilio Diniz.
In September 2013, the latter resold his shares in GPA. Enough to enter in force at Carrefour. Peninsula reaffirmed its long-term commitment to Carrefour on Monday.
