Capital raising: UBS leads the way in global deleveraging
DESPITE LITTLE SLEEP after a weekend finalizing his biggest acquisition to date, Brazilian billionaire and entrepreneur Andre Esteves feels he has just hit the jackpot. "I’m very, very excited," he says, laughing.
On April 20, Esteves announced that he had bought back Banco Pactual, a leading Brazilian investment bank, from Swiss bank UBS for $2.5 billion, three years after selling it.
The sale to UBS in May 2006 – for potentially up to $2.6 billion or six times book value – made Esteves Brazil’s youngest billionaire. Now he has Pactual back in his grasp for a little bit more than book value.
The newly named BTG-Pactual – a merger with Esteves’s year-old BTG Group – is on track to make the ambitious Brazilian even wealthier.
The newly created firm will consist of an investment...
