Anacleto Angelini, 93; Chilean businessman built $6-billion fortune
Anacleto Angelini, 93, an Italian-born businessman of modest origins who settled in Chile after World War II and became one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists, died of the flu and emphysema Tuesday at Catholic University Hospital in Santiago, news outlets reported.
In recent years, he was estimated to have a personal fortune of about $6 billion, placing his family among Chile’s richest. In March, Forbes magazine ranked him 119th on its list of billionaires.
Angelini said he arrived in Santiago in 1948 with about $100 but leveraged it with help from others to take control of a failing paint company. He quickly developed a reputation for salvaging poorly run endeavors.
The bulk of his fortune was made during the 1973-89 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, when Angelini benefited from the military government’s privatization scheme.
The son of a grain merchant, Angelini was born in 1914 near Ferrara, Italy, and spent the late 1930s in Ethiopia.
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