Adela: The Noble Birth and Costly Death of Early Venture Capitalism in Latin America

In 1963, Senator Jacob Javits proposed that the world's business community join together to form a new corporation that would underwrite private sector investments throughout Latin America. He presented his ideas to a NATO parliamentary meeting in Paris. His proposal was endorsed by the delegates, who passed a resolution recommending that the Secretaries-General of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) give their support. A task force was created and funded by the Ford Foundation, led by George S. Moore, President of the First National City Bank (now Citibank), Hermann Abs of Germany's Deutsche Bank and Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, among others. Javits was able to corral 240 of the world's largest corporations into forming an investment vehicle to do economic development in Latin America. Unfortunately, the structure of the venture became less like an investment company and more like a social club, a fact that would debilitate shareholder resolve just when it was most needed. This book is about how the Senator's dream faded as ADELA's unfettered enthusiasts invested -- increasingly with borrowed money -- in new ventures that would require years of good luck to prosper. Then the advent of Latin America's lost decade of the 1980s, precipitated by the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, spooked ADELA's creditor banks into closing it down. This book is the story of ADELA.

Review :
Joe Borgatti is probably the only person who could have written this book, and certainly the best qualified. Joe has had a prodigious experience of business life in many countries. He opened branches of Citibank in Latin America, developed a huge nickel mining and smelting complex in Guatemala, and has helped development banks resuscitate troubled deals from San Salvador to Egypt. ---John Train, author of Money Masters of Our Time Joe Borgatti knows his way around the developing world, having spent his 66- year professional career in Brazil, Guatemala, Egypt and Bulgaria. His insider's account of the failure of Adela Investment Co. to promote economic development in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s is contrasted with the hard-won successes of the Bulgarian-American Enterprise Fund in the 1990s. ADELA is a vigorous examination of what works and what doesn't. -- Melanie Kirkpatrick, former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, author of Escape from North Korea