On May 20, 1998, five days after the Justice ordered his arrest for the crime of Joseph Louis Heads, Alfredo Yabran committed suicide. But his death was not the end of the story, much less that of his emporium. The fortune of the man who during the 1990s boasted of having built “a State within the State” survived in the hands of his widow, Maria Christina Perez, and his sons, Marian, Paul Y melina. Installed in the most luxurious neighborhoods of Uruguay, the heirs became a practically impenetrable clan. From the shadows and with a very low profile, they continue managing old businesses and are encouraged to make new investments. Despite rubbing shoulders with the River Plate jet set, the businessman’s legacy remains intact and the Yabrán family continues to be a great mystery.
The Yabran they divide their life today between Montevideo, Punta del Este, Buenos Aires and Miami, cities where they not only have some of their properties but also important businesses in the field of logistics, shipping and real estate development. Marian he is the CEO of Sendit and the one who decided to put himself at the forefront of business life. Paul, his older brother, divides his working life with his activity as a DJ at electronic parties. Maria Cristina Y melina they let the men take care of the money and dedicate themselves to the family.
On the 20th anniversary of the assassination of heads, NEWS published a cover in which he rebuilt the lives of the tycoon’s heirs. As soon as the magazine hit the streets, the first reaction of the protagonists of the note was to close their social media accounts. It was not accidental: melina used Twitter to write encrypted messages about his father, whom he called “Dad,” and Marian He had compared Yabrán’s unconditional love for his family to that of Walter White, the drug lord on the series “Breaking Bad.”
Five years later, keeping track of them is no easy task. The YouTube channel of melina It is the only digital footprint left by the family on the web, where the tycoon’s youngest daughter published a video of the trip she made with the entire clan to Disney. Their friends, when they are consulted, prefer not to answer questions and although a good part of the business and political universe knows them, nobody wants to talk about them.
With the suicide of the businessman, the clan decided to break with a good part of the trusted men of Yabran What Wenceslao Bunge Y Pablo Argibay Molina, his spokesman and lawyer, respectively. according to account gabriel michi in his book “Heads. A journalist. A crime. A country” (Editorial Planeta), the accountants Francisco Gazquez-Molina Y Oscar Roberto Javurek and the lawyer Paul Medrano they are among the few who survived in the family environment and whose names appear in and out of the directories of their companies.
However, there was only one man who not only managed to stay by the side of the clan but also became someone of absolute trust for the heirs: the lawyer Hector Cole. In social networks, the children of Colella and the Yabran They maintain a permanent interaction and send affectionate messages that demonstrate a relationship that goes beyond what is strictly business.
In one of the letters he wrote before taking his own life, Yabran He arranged for his business to be taken over by “HC”, as he used to call his friend and trusted man. “The family Colella and the family Yabran they have a close lifelong bond”, they say from the environment of the lawyer, whose name appeared in the international investigation known as Pandora Papers and revived the suspicions that pointed to him, at the end of the 90s, as Yabrán’s figurehead, an accusation that it was formally presented in court by the then deputy Franco Caviglia and promoted by Eduardo Duhalde Y Sunday Horse.
Yabran’s fortune
Although 25 years have passed since the assassination of heads, the crime that ended up putting on the front page Yabran, it was never possible to establish exactly what fortune he left behind. The money declared at the end of the 90s was around 400 million dollars, but in those years Duhalde declared, in the press, that the businessman had hoarded “between three and four billion dollars” (a figure denied by the tycoon). When the succession was opened, the Justice established that the sum to be distributed between Maria Cristina, Marian, Paul Y melina It was about a billion dollars.
The mystery was never really solved. His death paralyzed the work that was in Congress, where a commission of deputies and senators had proposed to advance the suspicions of tax evasion. Furthermore, two years after the suicide, the federal judge Adolfo Bagnasco filed the only case that had been initiated against him for illicit association. The chronicles of the time report that Duhalde would have contributed in that cause a document that contained all the secret accounts that they would have Yabran and its collaborators abroad.
That piece of information became relevant again a few months ago and once again staged Colella. In October 2021, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that the lawyer hoarded US$145 million from the sale of Ocasa with an offshore structure in New Zealand and the Virgin Islands.
The operation had happened in 1997, when Colella bought Ocasa from Yabran then sold it to Exxel Group and bought it back in 2005. A year later, in 2006, the company expanded to the point of becoming a contractor for the US Federal Reserve. In the lawyer’s environment they insist that “it is money declared and with taxes paid” and clarify that “although their representatives reported that the funds came from the sale of Ocasa, the money is from the sale of OCA (owner of Ocasa)” .
Through brief responses to NEWS, those close to Colella insist on detaching the lawyer from Yabrán’s fortune, deny the newspaper titles that indicate him as “the heir” or “the successor” and repeat that, at present, HC Corporation (Colella’s group) “has no business in common ” with the Yabrán family.
The businesses of Yabrán’s heirs
Beyond heredity, the family of Yabran He continued with an active business life. In June 1998, two months after the suicide, the media reported that Paul Y Mariano Yabran They were already beginning to lead the companies that his father recognized as his own before his death: Yabito SA, Lanolec SA, Aylmer Inmobiliaria SA and Bosquemar Emprendimientos Turísticos SA.
Over the years it was Mariano who continued the business legacy with more force. The second of the three brothers appears in the records as CEO of Greenpol, a company dedicated to urban development. In addition, this company shares employees, telephone and office 1177 in the World Trade Center Montevideo with VJP Negocios, dedicated to investment in real estate and focused on short-term projects with capital injection. Currently, the main work is concentrated in the most exclusive areas of the Uruguayan capital, especially in Carrasco.
Marian, who between 2004 and 2006 did a master’s degree in Business Administration at the Universidad de la Empresa in Uruguay, is also in charge of Send It, a postal services company, the business with which his father managed to become one of the the most powerful businessmen in Argentina.
Paul, the eldest, never left the business, but he did decide to venture into other environments. At least eight years ago he got into the universe of electronic music as a DJ with the help of “Juanchi” Traverse, his wife’s brother, Paula Traverse, daughter of the car racer. With performances mostly in Punta del Este, it is said on the rave circuit that he had a lot to do with arranging for David Guetta to play at Creamfields.
In Montevideo, Paul He owns 70% of a company called Mpt Asset Management Corp, located in tower 1 office 2101 of the WTC in Montevideo. It is an investment advisory company. The other 30% is in the name of Diego Martin Stella Rebufello. The firm was fined in the British Virgin Islands for transferring shares and changing their ownership without prior written approval from the regulatory commission. According to official information from the islands, Mpt Asset has annual earnings of 4 million dollars. With the same partner, in addition, the elder Yabrán created an offshore company in Panama in 2015, La Especialista Holding Corporation SA.
Paul He also bet on real estate investments in Miami, where in 2015 he shared with his mother a luxury apartment valued at 1.5 million dollars. They did so by creating a corporation with the name and address of the luxurious property: Ocean Drive PH 07 Corp.
Christina He never had an active participation in business and, since he was widowed, he divides his days between Montevideo, where he has a mansion in the Manantiales de Carrasco neighborhood valued at 2.3 million dollars, and his residence in Punta del Este. In addition, in Punta Ballenas she has another property that she baptized “Mis amores” and that is a replica of one of the ranches that her husband had in Entre Ríos.
melina, like his mother, did not take care of business either. On a social level, she is the one who has a more active life on the internet: she uses Tik Tok, gives her opinion in digital forums about the hotels she stays at and makes purchases through Mercado Libre. Defined as “the favorite” of Yabrán, today she is the one in charge of the clan meetings. His name appears sharing the ownership of a house together with “María Traverso”, in Doral, an exclusive residential area on the outskirts of Miami.
What’s more, melina He tries to travel to Argentina frequently and is divided between Nordelta and Pinamar, where the family still preserves the emblematic mansion “Narbay” and where, 25 years ago, the crime that changed their lives forever took place.
Far from the weight that their last name carries in our country, the Yabrán set up their new base of operations in Uruguay, and also their new life. In the neighboring country, for a long time they preferred to use the last name Pérez, something that even made their Facebook friends not know who they were when they received their friend requests.
Now they went back to using their real surname. But they continue to be handled with the usual secrecy.
by Marcos Teijeiro and Giselle Leclercq
