Gaiuso Ribeiro: The judicial execution of Luis Felipe Vieira would be “unfavorable” for Novo Banco

The founder of the venture capital firm C2 Capital Partners (formerly Capital Creativo), Nuno Gaiuso Ribeiro, defended on Tuesday in Parliament the option of Novo Banco to restructure the debt of Luis Felipe Vieira, Benfica’s president, which led to the diversion of some of its funds into the units of the FIAE Fund. It is better to protect the bank’s interests.

In the case of the funds invested in real estate and tourism assets with long-term financial returns and great liquidity, it seemed that the execution solution or the quick sale of the assets or credits (and perhaps partially) appeared to be objective that he said Nuno Gaiuso Ribeiro at a hearing at the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Novo Banco Unfavorable to the creditor.

Gaiuso Ribeiro emphasized that Novo Banco’s decision “turned out to be the implementation of a model that has already been tested in the market in identical situations: establishing a fund that has obtained credits to access the holdings of assets, to exploit them, by developing and selling them over time, is desirable under better market conditions.”

The director of C2 Capital Partners, who had been director of Benfica for several years, and his partner in his company the son of Luis Felipe Vieira, Thiago Vieira, defended before MPs the merits of the operation carried out in 2017 with the creation of FIAE, which absorbed many of the land and real estate projects of the Promovalor, which controls On it is the Vieira family.

The process, maintained by Gaiuso Ribeiro, “avoided the sale of forced,“ out of control ”and recessive assets, at the same time that it“ materially strengthened Novo Banco’s safeguards against these assets, ”without debt forgiveness.

The founder of C2 confirmed that “the credits concerned correspond to the real assets,” stressing that “a quick solution to selling the assets will be detrimental to the interests of the creditor.” He defended, “When Novo Banco decided to establish the fund, it enjoys today a more solid legacy, economic and legal status than it was before.”

These assets include land in Loures, Alverca, and Tavira, as well as an office building in Maputo, Mozambique, and a hotel in Recife, Brazil.

Novo Banco owns 96% of FIAE units. The rest is owned by Luís Filipe Vieira.