Tycoon Alberto Cortina Alcocer has invested in the Luxembourg holding company that owns Ohai, the luxury campsite chain run by the youngest son of businessman and billionaire Alicia Koplowitz, Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz. Alberto Cortina’s Swiss company, Cinainvest Holding, values this instrument at more than 141 million.
This company domiciled in Geneva (Switzerland) created an instrumental company in Luxembourg a year ago, Cinainvest Holding Lux, which has just filed its first accounts with the Trade Register of the Grand Duchy. In these, it declares that at the end of 2023 it owns 14.4% of Ilanga, owner of Ohai. Cinainvest Holding Lux estimates in its accounts the value of this package at 20.4 million, which values 100% of the parent company Ohai at around 141.6 million.
In March 2021, elDiario.es announced that Cortina Koplowitz had domiciled the headquarters of her high-end camping activity in Luxembourg, launched a few years earlier with several directors of Parques Reunidos, after the purchase and renovation of a resort in Nazaré (Portugal), “in the largest ecological reserve of pine forests on the Iberian Peninsula”, as they point out on their website.
With expansion plans in Spain and Portugal, Cortina Koplowitz’s bungalow, glamping and tourist apartment project presents itself as a company committed to sustainable, ecological and experiential tourism, in the aim of helping to energize the local environment. economical while respecting the environment. A few months ago, Ohai hired Gerd Loewen, former CEO of Chicco or Babaria, as its first manager.
In addition to the so-called “glamping”, Ilanga presented in 2023 its other sector of activity, the company Wellness & Clinic Resorts, which announced an investment of 150 million for the opening in Marbella, scheduled for the end of 2025 , a luxury hotel and clinic in the former Incosol resort. Closed for a decade, this Marbella resort was once famous for its weight-loss clinic and for being a meeting place for film, music and art figures since its inauguration in 1973.
Some media outlets have published that Cortina Koplowitz is “flying alone” and “successful outside of her family” with Ohai and Ilanga. The documentation available in Luxembourg shows that among the shareholders of this fund in Luxembourg is the Swiss Cinainvest, linked for many years to his father.
On October 13, 2023, Cinainvest created the company which controls 14.4% of Ilanga. Initially, she was its sole shareholder, but a few weeks later, she transferred 49% of the shares of this vehicle to its main manager, Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz.
‘Los Albertos’, Fasana and the emeriti
Cinainvest is managed in Switzerland by Rhône Gestión, the large wealth management agency of financial advisor Arturo Fasana, who was responsible for setting up companies in tax havens for Cortina and his cousin and partner in construction company ACS, Alberto Alcocer , as the Panama Papers investigation revealed in 2016.
Fasana, who was released from the bench in 2020 due to the Gürtel plot, was also the leader of King Juan Carlos, a person very close to the couple known as “Los Albertos.” Cortina and his cousin were the main shareholders of Banco Zaragozano when the British Barclays bought this entity in 2003, in an operation linked to the first relevant revenues (1.9 million) that Zagatka, the opaque foundation in the name of a cousin of Juan Carlos I, who financed the pleasure trips of the emeriti for a decade, and for which the emeriti paid 4.4 million euros to the Public Treasury in February 2021 to avoid being judged for their tax crimes.
Created in 2007, Cinainvest is the holding company with which Alberto Cortina conveys his participation in his best-known project of recent years, his pan-African bank, grouped into the holding company Afrika Financial Group. The BDK financial group, chaired by Emilio Botín’s former right-hand man, Alfredo Sáenz (former CEO of Santander), is present in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mail, Benin, Togo and Conakry. A few months ago, he recruited former Secretary of State Jaime García-Legaz as an advisor.
In this project, Cortina and his cousin were accompanied, among other shareholders, by Blas Herrero, owner of Kiss FM, the Venezuelan Alejandro Betancourt, who amassed an enormous fortune with the electricity crisis suffered by the South American country in 2009, or the mysterious Singaporean company Noganoir, which charged a million dollar commission for the entry of the Qatari royal family to the Corte Inglés.
Businessman César Álvarez, brother of former El Corte Inglés president Isidoro Álvarez, is also a shareholder in Afrika Financial Group. His uncle and predecessor in the distribution group, César Areces, led the construction company FCC from the sudden death of the founder, Ernesto Koplowitz, until the executive power of the company passed into the hands of two young managers in 1972: Alberto Cortina and his cousin. ., the respective husbands of FCC heiresses Alicia and Esther Koplowitz.
Those we call “Albertos” abruptly left FCC simultaneously in 1990, after their respective divorces, in a scandal halfway between coated paper and the salmon press. Today, both are still among the largest shareholders of ACS. At the end of 2023, Alberto Cortina owned 2.8% of Florentino Pérez’s construction company through three of his companies, and his cousin Alberto Alcocer Torra, another 2.39%, according to the company’s latest corporate governance report. ‘ACS. Both managed to hold 13.86% of the company in 2010, while only the March family surpassed them (23.307%).
Alberto Cortina used Cinainvest years ago to take a stake in ACS, with a package of 678,000 shares of the construction company in late 2013. He also invested in Canadian Pacific Rubiales, a defunct Colombian oil giant, with the help of the Venezuelan Betancourt. He thus became one of the first investors in the Spanish technology company Jobandtalent. In the latter case, the relationship ended in court, due to disagreements over the value of the job search platform’s shares.
Alberto Cortina is the brother of the late Alfonso Cortina, whom José María Aznar appointed president of Repsol before privatizing Spain’s largest oil company. His grandfather was Alberto Alcocer, mayor of Madrid under the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Francisco Franco. Son of Franco’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pedro Cortina, he traditionally appears in the ranking of the Spanish rich. Forbes ranks him among the 2,500 richest people on the planet, with a net worth of $1.3 billion.
This publication places him in 34th place in its latest ranking of the greatest Spanish fortunes, between the steel magnate José María Aristrain and the shipowner Vicente Boluda, although far behind his ex Alicia Koplowitz (1.8 billion). The septuagenarian is also one of the major Spanish landowners. He owns the Las Cuevas farm, part of which is located in the Cabañeros National Park. Between the municipalities of Navas de la Estena (Ciudad Real) and Hontanar (Toledo), the businessman controls 6,335 hectares of hunting.
His son Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz, 39, has been Count of San Fernando de Peñalver since 2006. Based in London, the youngest of Cortina and Koplowitz’s three children is the only one not linked to the management of Omega Capital, the investment company. by Alicia Koplowitz whose SICAV Morinvest hired Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, former economic guru of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
