Navarro de Camargo inherited Camargo Correa from her husband Sebastiao Camargo, who started the business in 1939 and died in 1994. His focus was on construction and infrastructure, and Sebastiao is well known in Brazil for his role in building Brazil’s railways and roads in the decades after World War II.
Today the business is a true conglomerate. Bloomberg puts the amount invested in publicly traded companies at about $9.5 billion, including stakes in a Portuguese cement company (Cimpor Cimentos de Portugal SGPS), an electricity company (CPFL Energia SA), a Brazilian toll road group (CCR SA) and a controlling stake in the footwear manufacturer Alpargatas, the company behind Havaianas.
Camargo Correa also operates its own businesses in cement, construction and shipbuilding, although the latter runs at a loss.
While Navarro de Camargo operates mainly behind what Bloomberg calls “professional managers”, her emergence on this rich list will no doubt bring a new level of scrutiny to her affairs.
Happily, she won’t be the last of her family’s female billionaires. Her three daughters Regina, Renata and Rosana stand to inherit the business on her death.
It seems remarkable that Elaine Tettemer Marshall stayed off the world’s rich lists for so long, given her family’s involvement with one of the most infamous gold diggers of all time: Anna Nicole Smith.
While Elaine is 70 years old and Anna Nicole Smith was 39 when she died of a drug overdose in 2007, Smith is technically Elaine’s mother-in-law. Smith married Elaine’s father-in-law, J. Howard Marshall, in 1994, when Howard was 89 years old.
Howard died in 1995, but four months before his death Smith launched legal action against Elaine’s husband, E. Pierce Marshall, claiming that Pierce had interfered with “spousal support” Howard was trying to provide to Smith.
That lawsuit sparked a 16-year battle between Smith and the Marshall family. The fight eventually ended in 2011, but by then Pierce had been dead for five years and his fortune was in the hands of Elaine.
The centrepiece of this fortune – and the prize that Anna Nicole Smith fought so hard for – is a stake in Koch Industries, the $100 billion conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
According to Bloomberg, the 15% stake is worth $US12.7 billion.
The origins of that stake date back to 1959, when Koch Industries bought 35% of an oil company set up by Howard Marshall for about $US5 million in cash.
Ten years later, Koch Industries offered to swap the remaining 65% of the oil company for Koch Industries share. Howard astutely agreed and the stake has appreciated into a monumental fortune.
Elaine does not appear to be too keen to take ownership of her title as America’s fourth richest woman. In one of her few public comments she described the valuation as ridiculous.
James Thomson is a former editor of BRW’s Rich 200 and the publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
