George Peabody, who was one of the richest men in the world before the Forbes list came into existence, is credited with a phrase that sums up his philosophy of life: “Glagging is a target you hang on your back.”
Peabody was careful and frugal. He belonged to that first generation of nineteenth-century American captains of industry, unexpected billionaires, who despised excess and extravagant luxury. Though her heirs ended up squandering much of her fortune, Peabody stuck to a certain sense of vital balance and Presbyterian austerity and practiced philanthropy and patronage as alternatives to waste.
Jacob Safra wanted to be a billionaire in Peabody’s footsteps. As a descendant of a lineage of Sephardic Jews who emigrated from northern Lebanon, he always tried to remain unnoticed. His maxim was that great fortunes must be built and managed in silence, away from the focus and prying eyes. This strident allergy allowed him to enrich himself in the dynamic and effervescent Brazil of Getúlio Vargas, where he settled in 1952. Safra crossed the ocean and settled in São Paulo with his wife, Esther, and their four boys when he realized that Beirut had settled. transformed into an environment increasingly toxic and less suitable for good business.
The boys from Brazil
In the great metropolis of São Paulo, he founded an investment bank that today is one of the most solid in Latin America. This was the first stone of a financial empire that would eventually reach, intact and expanding, to its three eldest sons, Edmond, Joseph and Moise. Seven decades after the Safras emigrated to the southern hemisphere, Jacob’s daughter-in-law Vicky Safra, widow of her son Joseph (died December 2020), has just inherited most of the immense family fortune, thus becoming one of the women richest in the world.
Forbes assigns her assets of approximately 6.9 billion euros (41 billion reais) and manages, along with two of her children, financial assets worth more than 90 billion euros (538 billion reais). Even Greece, the country in which she was born 68 years ago, has just dedicated journalistic articles to her in which she is proclaimed its richest citizen, a huge fortune equal to the Onassis and the rest of the prominent Greek opulence in the 20th century.
If until now very little has been said about her, it is because Vicky Safra is a worthy disciple of her father-in-law. She also knows how to go unnoticed and knows the virtues of thriving in silence. Those who are proud to know her point out that she is a prudent woman with a low profile, who keeps herself on the fringes of social life, gives almost no interviews and divides her time between a discreet mansion in Geneva and an even more discreet chalet in Crans -Montana, in the Bernese Alps. Even though he runs a conglomerate with an epicenter in Brazil and branches in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, he has hardly left Switzerland for at least a decade.
In the Swiss canton of Valais, which Crans-Montana is part of, it has neighbors as distinguished as James Blunt and Sofia Loren, but very rarely participates in the exclusive scene and nightlife of this corner of the Rhône valley. She especially values that it is a quiet, healthy and free of paparazzi, the place where she and her husband decided to settle down to lead a quiet life after decades of itinerant life between São Paulo, New York and London.
Owners of Everything
An article from the magazine Bloomberghighlights that Vicky is not only the executor and main shareholder of the two main financial entities of the family, Banco Safra do Brasil and J. Safra Sarasin of Switzerland, but also the owner of real estate assets such as 30 St Mary Ax in London ( the famous Gherkin (or ‘pickles’, designed by Norman Foster in the heart of the London city) and the also luxurious office complex at 660 Madison Avenue in New York, which is about to be transformed into an apartment complex Luxury property of little less than incalculable value.
– Picture of Vicky and Joseph Safra’s wedding, taken from the family’s website. jsafrasarasin.com
Roberto Bento Vidal, a Brazilian financial advisor who worked with the Safra family, told Forbes that the transfer of family assets of Sephardic origin is little less than unusual: “The most common among the large personal fortunes resulting from the business initiative is that it does not arrive intact to the third generation, generally fragment, are wasted and dissipated along the way”. In the case of the Safras, “we see a well-structured process of transferring capital and assets that is typical of their own family tradition, that of a clan that has always remained united and managed its assets efficiently and methodically”.
Economic journalist Carrie Hojnicki, in a detailed article on the website Business Insider, highlights that “the Safras have always acted with an ancestral prudence, typical of the families of Jewish moneylenders in the Middle East, people used to arousing fears and being harassed and persecuted”. As a very significant story, Hojnicki tells that, until a few years ago, all the internal documents of his companies were written “in a Sephardic dialect in Arabic characters”, a kind of secret code “coherent with the tendency to discretion and a certain mystery ” which is the brand of the house.
Far mountains and remote deserts
The origin of the family fortune is in the Syrian city of Aleppo, which until 1918 was part of the Ottoman Empire. There, in the 1840s, the Safra brothers, merchants from northern Lebanon, were attracted by the possibility of financing camel caravans on routes as profitable (and very risky) as those to Alexandria and Istanbul. The Safras got rich thanks to these convoys that crossed the Anatolian steppes and the Negev desert.
After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the family left Syria to settle further south in Beirut, then capital of the French Protectorate of Lebanon. Joseph Safra was born in the multicultural Lebanese city in 1938. He was the third son of the patriarch Jacob and was just a teenager when his family settled in Brazil. Joseph grew up in the shadow of his older brother Edmond, a precocious entrepreneur who started to participate in the family business at age 16 and who as early as 1956, at age 24, moved to Switzerland to found the Trade Development Bank in Geneva.
From Europe, Edmond took the leap to the United States, with the creation in New York, in 1966, of the Republic National Bank. While Joseph and his brother Moise completed their academic training in London with the expectation of one day succeeding their father, the restless and ambitious Edmond set out on his own, multiplying by 500 a starting capital of a million dollars in just 20 years. By the time he turned forty, Edmond Safra had established himself among the most prosperous bankers in the world. The US branch was once the third most powerful financial institution in the New York area behind Citigroup and Chase Manhattan. Similar success would lead Edmond to become the first (and only) Safra to break with the family tradition of discretion, austerity and silence.
The Turbulent Years
First, he was forced by the Latin American debt crisis to sell his most promising business, the Trade Development Bank. The Brazilian branch of the Safra conglomerate was going through a delicate moment and the son had to go to his father’s rescue. The buyer was American Express and the transaction was paid for a respectable 650 million dollars (3.2 billion reais). Trouble came years later, when Safra tried to use a confusing clause that allowed him to repossess part of the stockholders of the sold company. American Express denounced this part of the contract and embarked on a discredit campaign that, for the first time, put the Syrian-Lebanese family in the spotlight. The economic press began to publish articles about the speculative and dubious origin of the Safra fortune, as well as alleged favorable treatment by the Brazilian authorities, Edmond began to be portrayed as an eccentric, supposedly a womanizer (he remained single until the age of 44) and an opportunistic and amoral finance shark.
His younger brother, Joseph, already led the group’s operations in Latin America and had just married Vicky Sarfati, a Brazilian of Greek origin who was 17 years old at the time. Joseph himself urged his brother to marry as soon as possible to ensure succession in the family business, but Edmond, as Carrie Hojnicki put it, “was a neurotic of pathological suspicion, and was convinced that all the women he approached were upstarts who were only interested in their money”.
Everything changed with the arrival of Lily Monteverde, a wealthy middle-aged Brazilian heiress whose second husband, billionaire Alfredo Monteverde, had committed suicide in 1969. Edmond found in her a woman who appealed to him and with a considerable personal fortune that made it difficult to distrust your true intentions. But the candidate for queen consort of the financial empire did not win the family’s approval. Joseph and Moise considered her too old to have children and too frivolous to adapt to the circumspect Safra lifestyle.
Edmond broke up with her in 1971 to reconcile a year later and break up again after a few months. In 1976, the couple finally went up to the altar, but not before signing a prenuptial agreement of more than 600 pages that the Financial Times defined as “a masterpiece of law applied to marriage”.
Willow Fires
With Lily, the Safras unreservedly placed the target of ostentation on their backs. The veteran heiress enjoyed to the end a foul-mouthed lifestyle that would have horrified both Peabody and Jacob Safra. He even accumulated more than twenty luxury homes across the planet, starting with Leopolda, a lavish villa on the French Riviera decorated by world-class interior designers like Renzo Mongiardino and Mica Ertegün.
While battling in court with American Express, Safra spent several months a year at the fantasy seaside mansion, hiring the best chefs in the world and hosting massive parties that writer and fashion editor John Fairchild, who attended some of them, described as “ the most obscene display of decadent consumerism imaginable.”
True to his neurosis, Edmond surrounded himself with a small army of Israeli Mossad-trained bodyguards who were rarely separated from him. So many precautions could not prevent, however, that the banker died in December 1999 in very suspicious circumstances, victim along with his nurse Viviana Torres of an intentional fire in one of his mansions, located in Monte Carlo. Another of his bodyguards and nurses, the American (and former Green Beret) Ted Maher, was accused of starting the fire and sentenced to ten years in prison, but this was no obstacle to speculating at length about a possible involvement. from the Russian mafia and even from his widow, from whom at the time he was about to part ways.
After Edmond’s death, the Safras once again turned into low-profile millionaires, heavily involved in the philanthropic activity of their foundation, especially active in Brazil and Israel. Joseph bought from his brother Moise the part of the family business he still did not control, centralized and rationalized the Safra conglomerate and, finally, after passing away at 82 with Parkinson’s Disease, he bequeathed him, intact and healthy, to his wife and his family. four children, two of whom are involved in the management of the group’s businesses. The saga of bankers who started by financing caravans and ended up venturing without thinking about the consequences continues now in the 21st century. And again, without ostentation putting an unnecessary target on your back.
