The son-in-law of the president of Mercadona, Juan Roig, partner and director of the Atitlan firm, has found an opportunity in the pandemic crisis with investment in company debt.
The troubled waters of a crisis are a sea of opportunities for those who know how to take advantage of them. Roberto Centeno, founding partner of the Atitlan investment group, has shown that he moves like a fish in water in these situations, although there are also those who would identify him more with the cliché image of the financial shark hunting companies in difficulty.
Debt operations such as Room Mate have been one of the specialties of the firm directed by Centeno
The firm that Centeno runs has just become the lifeline of businessman Enrique Sarasola and his Room Mate chain of hotel establishments. A credit of 15 million euros granted by Atitlan has prevented the insolvency of the Sarasola chain. With this fresh money, the company hopes to reach the summer and clear in these months the obtaining of the 52 million that .
Debt operations such as Room Mate have been one of the specialties of the firm directed by Centeno. To materialize them, the group created Atitlan Loans in 2015, a subsidiary to which the group has injected 51 million and which between 2017 and 2019 contributed 7.4 million in dividends to the parent company thanks to the interest generated. A business that the executive himself knows first-hand since, after studying in the United States, he forged his career for more than a decade in investment banking in London.
From the ‘city’ to Valencia
Precisely those years at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in the London city are the link that united him with the other founding partner of Atitlan, Aritza Rodero, with whom he created the firm in Valencia in 2005. Atitlan, however, did not start only with the assets of his professional experience, he also had an important family endorsement. Centeno’s father was CEO of Enagás and Campsa decades ago and has recently been a regular as a political and economic analyst in the media. He is also married to Carolina, one of the four daughters of the president of Mercadona, Juan Roig, who is his son-in-law. A relationship that since Atitlan was born has made him always plan a possible relationship with Mercadona about his operations, despite the attempts of the firm’s partners to disassociate themselves.
The fact that Atitlan’s first steps as a venture capital manager were concentrated on exclusive suppliers of the Valencian supermarket chain itself also had a lot to do with this association of ideas, something that aroused misgivings in the sector. Although today Atitlan maintains some investments related to the primary sector, such as olive and almond groves or aquaculture, it has broadened its focus to all kinds of sectors, from finance to real estate, construction or restaurants.
And that’s not the only big difference in strategy. If shortly before the 2008 crisis broke out, the Atitlan venture capital fund had raised 30 million euros to invest, Centeno has a much larger checkbook for this pandemic crisis: close to 1,000 million. That was the figure that the group itself announced that it intended to invest at the end of 2019, before the coronavirus.
Before the loan to Room Mate, the investment firm was already negotiating with Villar Mir the option of providing financing and assuming Ferroglobe to channel the renegotiation of the group, although in the end it did not bear fruit.
High profitability
Some operations that fit the profile of the so-called vulture funds, but in which Centeno has also achieved success for the partners of the rescued firms beyond the profitability for Atitlan itself.
One of the most famous was that of the old group from Castellón Lubasa, today renamed Symmetry. The one that was the largest public works awardee in the Valencian Community and one of its largest real estate developers was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2017 after several refinancing companies. With the entry of Centeno’s firm, he managed to agree with the bank to forgive part of the debt. After the sale of some of their businesses, such as the Saloni tile maker, the Batalla family has gradually regained ownership of the bulk of their business.
In the real estate field, which Atitlan had initially ruled out, Centeno has also reaped triumphs, such as the purchase, together with a fund, of the land where the Valencia Formula 1 circuit was located. A land that had become the most expensive in the city. Or the entry into NAU, owner of several shopping centers and land in Valencia.
Even in operations that went wrong, such as the frustrated purchase attempt of the Valencian hospital group Nisa, the nose of the former investment banker allowed him to achieve significant returns. Centeno was plunged into a control war between some of the former partners and Vithas, which ultimately triggered the price of the 8% he had acquired months earlier. In the last two years that appear in the Mercantile Registry (2018 and 2019) Atitlan added almost 100 million euros of net profit.
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