Hedging frustrating says Brazilian tycoon

A Brazilian tycoon said last week that Portugal’s ‘maybe’ attitude to business deals is frustrating.

In an interview with ECO, Ricardo Bellino said at a book launch in Porto that sitting on the fence rather than saying “no” outright is one of things that most annoyed him about doing business in Portugal.
The billionaire and onetime business partner of Donald Trump tried to buy the estate Herdade do Pinheirinho at Comporta twice, and ended up abandoning that business projects in Portugal feeling disillusioned.
The grandson of Portuguese immigrants, but born in Brazil, was in Porto last week to launch his book on Personal PAOs (IPO Pessoal) and talked about his three years living in Portugal.
In 2018 Bellino moved to Portugal from Miami, Florida where he lived between 2007 and 2018. It was in Florida that he met Jorge Espírito Santo who as the director of operations at Banco Espírito Santo in that area, and who persuaded him to put forward a proposal for a real estate project at Comporta on Portugal’s Alentejo coast.
Ricardo Bellino signed a co-development contract but the project was interrupted by the collapse of BES and GES in 2014.
Moving to Portugal in 2018, and still prepared to invest in Comporta, things didn’t go according to plan.
“I have difficulty in achieving a pace and dynamic in managing my developments here. In Portugal it was difficult to get replies: often a quick ‘no’ is better than a long, drawn out ‘maybe’. Portugal seems to be a country of ‘perhaps’ rather than ‘yes’ or ‘no’”, he told ECO in Porto where the book launch took place.
The entrepreneur says that the processes involving financial decisions, coupled with red tape makes everything much slower and at a pace “I’m not used to”. “I was brought up in an Anglo-Saxon business culture”, he remarked.
Although he failed in his plans at Comporta, he said he takes his hat off to French luxury real estate investor Claude Berda and director José Botelho who managed to “resolve obstacles”. “That’s the kind of investor I like because they take risks and everything they do is done well”.