Giovanni Mahler

Carlo Giovanni Luigi Mahler, known as Giovanni Mahler, is a Swiss entrepreneur, born on June 20, 1947 in Lugano, in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland.
His father was a banker at Banque Populaire Suisse (BPS, now part of Credit Suisse) and his mother was a housewife. He is their elder son.
He graduated in business administration from Columbia University in the City of New York and started his professional career in the United States. His first job was at the oil & gas department of Loeb, Rhoades & Co., a Wall Street investment bank.
He married three times: first with Fiona Swarovski, the heir to her family business, Swarovski Crystal, a jewelry and fashion accessories enterprise, then with Giannina Facio, a Costa Rican producer and daughter of Costa Rica’s former minister of Finance today married with Ridley Scott an English film director and producer and with Esperanza Llado Garcia Lomas from the Llado family which is the main shareholder of Técnicas Reunidas. With Esperanza Llado Garcia Lomas, he has a son, Juan. He is divorced.
When he came back to Switzerland in the early 1980s, he created a financial company named “Financial Management Services” (FMS) which acquired a Swiss bank, Banque de Participations et de Placements, and later sold it to Intra Investment Company (IIC), the first and one of the major sovereign wealth investment companies in the Middle East (the major shareholders of the company were the governments of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Lebanon). FMS succeeded several M&A deals such as the financial structuring of the acquisition by First Arabian Corporation of the Italian assets of Amoco (Standard Oil Company of Indiana), mainly a refinery and service stations, to create Tamoil, through a $375 million syndicated loan led by Banca di Roma.
He launched Seagas, an oil trading firm which supplied Tamoil and had an annual turnover of $10 billion. Seagas in the 1980s and then the Libyan Government in the 1990s became shareholders of Tamoil and expanded in Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Spain): more than 3,000 service stations, an extensive pipeline distribution system and three refineries with a daily capacity of 255,000 barrels of oil. Tamoil also acquired stakes in Petrolchimica which had a plant in Switzerland and another one in Italy processing lubricant oil as well as Petrocaltex which was marketing and distributing lubricant oil. Seagas was awarded by ENI a construction project in Bassorah, Iraq and various other projects in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh government awarded Seagas the construction of part of Astana city (for which Seagas secured a $1 billion loan from Deutsche Bank) in partnership with Mabetex. And, the Russian Presidency awarded Seagas the reconstruction of Kremlin Palace in partnership with Mercata. The company also built a supertanker to ship 240,000 tons of crude oil. In the 1990s, Seagas also formed Navigator Gas and established a fleet of ethylene and LPG carriers which became the largest in the world and had a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion. Seagas developed Aurado field in Kazakhstan and listed Aurado Energy on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
At the end of the 1990s, with Jorg Bucherer, Giovanni Mahler also established Vela Holdings which later became Bluegreen Holdings. Bluegreen owned Kay Jewelry (listed on the NYSE), the biggest jewelry chain of shops in the United States and Balfour MacLaine (listed on AMEX), one of the world-largest traders of soft commodities. Both companies were headed by Anthonie C. van Ekris. Bluegreen also became the main shareholder of Moncler and sold its stake in 2008. Moncler’s market capitalization reached €16 billion in 2021.
Bluegreen also acquired 9% of Horsham Corp., the owner of Barrick Resources, the world’s largest gold producer. In the 2000s, Bluegreen acquired stakes in ATVS, an iron-ore producer in Kazakhstan and in Minas Rio Bravo, a company with licenses to extract Rare Earth Elements, Quarz and Silica Sand, heavy and precious Metals. Since 2020, Bluegreen invest mostly in natural and digital resources.
While some medias accused Giovanni Mahler for bribing Russian President Boris Yeltsin to get awarded the construction of the presidential airplane, it was then demonstrated that this was done by his partner Mercata. He was then never charged for this scandal. In the Enimont scandal, FMS and him were never charged as they only executed orders from their clients.
 
Category:1947 births
Category:Swiss businesspeople
Category:People from Lugano