Word: francos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...like many other of Franco Spain's unpopular laws-such as forcing traffic actually to stop at a red light-the new curfew seems doomed to be broken. Valentin, owner of one of Madrid's leading restaurants, will be one of the first to break it. "I'll pay all the fines I have to," he says, "but I won't close at midnight. I owe it to my public. If the fines are too big, I'll ask the United States for a foreign aid loan...
Beer is known to have had advance information about the Sinai campaign and, presumably, the coordinated Franco-British attack on Suez, which he allegedly passed on to the Soviet Union. The Russians, clearly, did not inform the Egyptians. They seem to have used their foreknowledge to behave with brutal swiftness in crushing the Hungarian rebellion, confident that the Suez attack would be certain to divert world public opinion...
With a passionate aversion to publicity, March seldom allows his name to appear as the president or director of any of his companies, and, in the censored press of Dictator Franco, he gets away with it. Acting through intermediaries, March owns or controls Spain's tobacco and gasoline monopolies, a major bank (Banco Central), the principal brewery, chemical companies, mines, shipyards, steel plants, power and oil companies, and even a Coca-Cola bottling plant. He has a stake in the Institute Nacional de Industria, the state-owned agency for industrial development that controls and invests in private industry with...
...classic example of the way March has built his financial empire. The holding company of the Catalonian utilities had been The Barcelona Traction, Light & Power Co., Ltd., a Canadian corporation that was in turn controlled by Sofina. Eager to take over the utilities, March persuaded Franco to ban the export of their profits to Barcelona Traction's Canadian headquarters. Cut off from its sources of revenue, Barcelona Traction could not pay the interest on its outstanding bonds, most of which were held outside Spain. They tumbled in value, were quickly snapped up by March at cut-rate prices...
March then pressured Franco's courts to declare Barcelona Traction bankrupt. Since Barcelona Traction held all of the Catalonian utilities common stock in Canada, the courts ordered "duplicate" shares printed in Spain, auctioned off the counterfeit shares to the highest bidder-who was, of course, Juan March. Control of the multimillion-dollar empire thus passed to March for only $900,000. Sofina, left with a paper corporation, fought the case through the courts, spent more than $3,000,000 on legal fees. Even if Sofina wins a whopping settlement (prospect: $13 million to $16 million) March has a bargain...