Los Minerales Hermanos: How two friends made a fortune in Colombia and expect to do it again
Frank Giustra and Serafino Iacono roam the streets of Cartagena.
“We were almost killed several times,” Frank Giustra tells me. He’s recalling his first trip to Colombia in 1994 with his friend Serafino Iacono. FARC guerrillas and cocaine traffickers had made the country the most dangerous in the Americas, but it seemed like nothing could stop the two young natural resource promoters’ quest for the next big score.
Fast forward twenty years, and Frank Giustra has been involved in the creation of at least four multi-billion dollar companies. Serafino Iacono and his longtime partner Jose Francisco Arata’s five-year-old Pacific Rubiales Energy (TSX:PRE) has a market cap of approx. $7 billion — and a 2012 net income greater than Facebook (age 9) and Linkedin (age 10) combined….
