Americanas case has too many poor things – 02/18/2023 – Elio Gaspari

After examining the accounts of the Americanas retail chain, the company’s three major shareholders were willing to invest R$ 7 billion in the business. Creditors found little. (Days before, the offer was at BRL 6 billion.)

Billion here, billion there, Americanas is likely to survive, shrinking. It would leave the electronic sales market and go back to being a simple chain of stores, where the customer enters, picks up the goods, pays and leaves.

Americanas was caught in a long-lasting fraud. Investigations will tell who knew what and who took how much. The market always knew that Americanas was squeezing suppliers by extending payments for months.

So far, the numbers show the following:

Over the past ten years, Jorge Paulo Lemann, Carlos Alberto Sicupira and Marcel Telles, the major shareholders, received R$500 million in dividends and invested R$1.5 billion in capital increases. None of the three sold Americanas shares.

During the same period, the company’s executives received R$ 700 million in performance bonuses alone.

(What performance? If the idea was to cut costs because, like fingernails, they always grow, now they are trying to pull other people’s nails.)

Between August and September, when it became public that Americanas would be headed by Sergio Rial, an executive from Banco Santander, company directors sold R$244.3 million in shares. (At the end of 2022 Americanas flipped, going from profit to loss.)

Over the last ten years, banks have been happy partners with Americanas and, in legitimate credit operations, earned something like R$ 20 billion.

As Carlos Alberto Sicupira said in an energizing lecture for papermakers:

“Brazil will not be the United States. Because Brazil is the country of the poor thing, of rights without obligation and it is the country of impunity. This is cultural. It will not change.”

This phrase echoes the Prince of Salinas in the novel “The Leopard”, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, explaining the grandeur and decadence of Sicily. With an estimated shortfall of R$ 40 billion, the case of Americanas has too many poor things. Everyone exercised their rights. It now remains to be seen whether the Securities and Exchange Commission will show them the size of their obligations and responsibilities.

gold numbers

The Federal Police estimates that between 2020 and 2022 illegal mining will have extracted 13 tons of gold from the Amazon.

That said, it’s just another number. It is estimated that in five years the Serra Pelada mine produced 30 tons. In 1983, its best year, it produced 17 tons.

Between 1735 and 1755, at the height of the gold cycle, Brazilian mines produced around 15 tons per year.

Doing the math in another way, the major shareholders of the Americanas chain offered a contribution of R$ 7 billion. There are 22.5 tons of gold.

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