Mexico Bank Acquired for $2.5 Billion : Finance: The head of the nation’s biggest brewing company has gained 51% controlling interest in its second-largest bank.

Investors led by the chairman of Mexico’s top brewery made the winning bid Monday for Bancomer, the country’s second-largest bank, with an offer to pay the government $2.5 billion for a controlling interest.

Eugenio Garza Laguera--whose Monterrey-based Visa Group had revenue of $1.6 billion last year, mainly from the sale of such well-known beers as Tecate, Dos Equis and Superior--is a member of the third generation of Mexico’s leading industrial dynasty.

Before the banks were nationalized in 1982, he was a major stockholder in Banca Serfin, Mexico’s third-largest bank.

With eight of Mexico’s 18 commercial banks sold, Bancomer is the fourth that has been won by investors from the northern industrial city of Monterrey.

Bancomer’s $25 billion in assets represents about one-fourth of Mexico’s bank assets, making it second in size only to Banco Nacional de Mexico, which was sold earlier this year to investors led by stock-market titan Roberto Hernandez.

Domestically, the bank has 754 branches. And Bancomer is one of only three Mexican banks that aggressively pursue international business, with nine foreign agencies and representative offices.

Garza Laguera, 67, was able to swing the deal thanks to a $900-million bridge loan from Morgan Guaranty. The industrialist is a chemical engineer with degrees from the University of Texas and the prestigious Monterrey Institute of Technology. He began working in the family business in 1946, in the research department of the Cuauhtemoc brewery.

In 1974, after his father’s death, he became chairman of Visa. Under his leadership, the company diversified, with acquisitions that included the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler, located in Mexico City.

In 1984, two years after he lost Banca Serfin to nationalization, he put together a group of former Serfin shareholders and Visa shareholders to buy back the banking firm’s insurance and leasing companies. Those businesses were the beginning of Vamsa Group, which completed the circle Monday by buying Bancomer.

“This will be a good fit with their other business, such as the Seguros Monterrey insurance company,” said Scott Galle, who follows Mexican stocks, including Visa, for Los Angeles-based D. A. Campbell Associates. “They are following the universal banking model that we have seen in the Mexican bank sales so far. There are tremendous synergies with their other businesses--selling insurance at bank branches, for example.”

Monterrey historian Abraham Nunio--who has written a book about Monterrey’s powerful businesses, including Visa’s brewery--said the sale represented the return of banking pre-eminence to Mexican oligopolies.

“Nine years after (nationalization), they give them back a bigger bank than the one they had,” he said. “This is an anachronism disguised as a novelty.”

Garza Laguera’s 200-investor group bid $2.5 billion--$1.06 a share--for 51% of the company. Another group of 5,100 employees and regional directors had an option to buy up to 25% of the bank stock at the price offered by the winner. That group raised $650 million, enough to purchase 13.2% of the bank. Altogether, that meant the proceeds to the government totaled about $3.2 billion.