Francesco Macri

Francesco Raùl Macri (15 April 1930 – 2 March 2019) was an Italian-Argentine contractor, developer, industralist and father of former Argentine President Mauricio Macri.

Life and career

Childhood in Italy

Macri was born in Rome, to Giorgio Macri and Lea Garbini. His mother belonged to a prosperous local family, proprietors of an intercity bus service and supporters of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

His father, in turn, was born to a family of fallen nobility from the Calabria region. Opponents of ''il Duce'', their kinship to the powerful Pellicano clan allowed them to retain a small postal service carrier in the area around San Giorgio Morgeto. The eight-year-old Franco and his two younger siblings were sent to a military school in 1938, following their parents' divorce two years earlier, a common fate for the children of divorced couples under Italian Fascism. They were reunited with their father in Genoa five years later.Ale, Ana. ''La Dinastía''. Editorial Planeta, 2001.

Arrival in Argentina

The birth of the Italian Republic prompted Giorgio Macri to enter politics, by which he co-founded a nationalist party, the ''Common Man's Front'', ahead of the general elections in June 1946; following the party's poor showing, however, he departed for Buenos Aires, settling in the western suburb of San Justo. He immigrated with two of his seven siblings- Antonio (the father of Jorge Macri) and Maria Pia (who married Antonio Calcaterra). He later obtained housing in the Eva Perón Foundation's Ciudad Evita community, and was joined by his three children in January 1949. Franco Macri found work in as a construction laborer; he was promoted quickly and held an administrative post within a year, later earning his secondary school diploma at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and, in 1950, establishing a construction firm, Urbana.

Obtaining a number of small, public contracts, Urbana ultimately failed, and Macri entered into a partnership, Vimac, in 1953. The firm was boosted by a lucrative contract from Loma Negra, the leading Argentine cement producer, for the construction of a new plant near Tandil in 1955. He married Alicia Blanco Villegas, the daughter of a prominent Tandil physician, in 1958, relocated to Mar del Plata, and had the first of their four children, Mauricio, in 1959.

Leading contractor

Macri started a home builder, Demaco, and purchased a tiny Buenos Aires apartment facing Vicente López Plaza (in the heart of the upscale Recoleta district). The 1962 installation of ultraconservative Economy Minister Alvaro Alsogaray, however, and the latter's policy of paying state contractors and employees with worthless "Ninth of July Bonds" led to Vimac's closure.

Joined by two investors and aided by an economic recovery, in 1964 he fused Demaco with the remains of Vimac to establish Impresit-Sideco. The firm secured a coveted contract with Italian automaker Fiat, for the construction and maintenance of their Caseros factory, and quickly became a leading public works contractor, notably in the construction of the General Belgrano Bridge, the Atucha I and Embalse nuclear power plants (Latin America's first), as well as in private works, such as an AGIP gas pipeline and the Catalinas Norte office park.Fundación Konex: Francesco Macri; accessed 11 March 2019.
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Inheriting his father's interest in film (the elder Macri had worked for the iconic Cinecittà Studios), he also established MBC, which produced cinema for local directors Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and Alejandro Doria, among others.

Having completed over 30 major public works projects worth over US$1.8 billion since 1964, Macri acquired Philco and NEC's Argentine affiliates and gained controlling interest in Impresit and established Socma, a holding company for his various interests, in 1976. The installation of the last dictatorship that year, and their appointment of Buenos Aires Mayor Osvaldo Cacciatore led to the closure of the city's tens of thousands of apartment building incinerators, whose noxious disposal of the city's 3,000 daily tons of refuse had been worsening air quality for decades. Cacciatore had them replaced in 1979 with curbside pickup service awarded to ''Manliba'', a consortium between Impresit-Sideco and Waste Management, Inc.

Macri's marriage ended in separation in 1980 (no provision existed in Argentina for divorce until 1987), and in 1982 he married Cristina Cressier, with whom he had his sixth child, Florencia. The collapse of the Argentine auto industry in 1981–82 allowed Macri to purchase a controlling stake in Sevel Argentina S.A., a local joint venture between Fiat and Peugeot formed in 1980. The acquisition averted the closure of the European automakers' Argentine plants, and tripled Socma's income.

Macri's finances were undermined, however, from losses stemming from the Banco de Italia y Río de la Plata, of which he was majority shareholder between 1975 and 1980. The subsequent crisis, which resulted from the implosion of Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz's financial deregulation and strong peso policies, also prompted Macri to take advantage of an exchange rate guarantee enacted by the Central Bank in 1980 for large private borrowers facing sharply higher U.S. dollar payments, a benefit granted to Sevel.

Ventures and misadventures

Macri entered into a valuable real estate venture in New York, when in 1979, developer Abraham Hirschfeld sold him a 75% stake in 30 hectares (75 acres) of Hudson Riverfront land formerly owned by Penn Central. Planning to develop " Lincoln West," a residential complex, Macri invested US$100 million in mandated public works and related expenses, but could not, ultimately, service a Chase Manhattan loan or meet the city's myriad zoning demands, selling the land to Donald Trump in 1985 for US$117 million. The aforementioned disappointment was compounded by a heart attack in 1983, and the end of his second marriage in 1986, by which he lost custody of Florencia. He suffered serious losses during the country's repeated currency crises between 1987–90, but gained from a partnership with BellSouth and Motorola to form Movicom, the first large-scale Argentine mobile phone service provider.

A supporter of La Rioja Province Governor Carlos Menem ahead of his upset victory in the 1988 Justicialist Party primaries, Macri broke from the flamboyant president when, after his 1989 election (which he won on a populist platform), he pursued aggressive free trade policies that undermined Sevel (by then the largest automaker in Argentina) in favor of cheaper imports. Carlos Grosso, Menem's appointed Mayor of Buenos Aires (a presidential prerogative until 1996), was a managerial employee of Macri's. A vocal Peronist, Grosso had reportedly been spared becoming one of the "disappeared" upon his 1978 military abduction only by Macri's appeal on his behalf to Internal Affairs Minister Albano Harguindeguy