It happened just last Tuesday. It was around eight thirty in the morning when Julio Ponce Lerou, the former president and one of the main shareholders of SQM, the second largest lithium producer in the world, entered the conference room of the W hotel in Santiago de Chile where the annual seminar of the investment bank BTG Pactual. He did so accompanied by Francisca, the third of his four children, considered the closest to the businessman and who is seen as his most likely successor. For several years now, Julio Ponce has not appeared at social events. The businessman, former son-in-law of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — he was married between 1969 and 1991 with Verónica Pinochet, the third of the five children that the dictator had with Lucía Hiriart —, left the presidency of SQM in 2015 after pressure from minority shareholders later that the case of illegal political financing in which the non-mining company was involved exploded. Then, in 2018, he had to give up control of the company as a condition for the State to extend to SQM the lease contract for the Salar de Atacama, one of the main lithium reserves in the world, until 2031. Dubbed the king of lithium by Bloomberg, Ponce entered the ownership of SQM during the controversial privatization process that took place in Chile during the dictatorship of his father-in-law and over the years he consolidated his position until he became its controller. Today it is estimated that he has around 25% of the company, which places him as the fourth largest fortune in Chile, with 3.3 billion dollars, according to Forbes. Today, in the midst of negotiations between the Chilean state-owned Codelco and SQM to exploit in set the lithium from the Salar de Atacama until 2060, the businessman, at 78 years old, begins to prepare his succession. His four children have participated or participate in the companies upstream of SQM, known as Cascadas. But it is Francisca Lucía Ponce Pinochet (44 years old, Santiago)—she takes her middle name after her maternal grandmother—who arrives in a privileged position. Graduated in marketing from the University of Arts, Sciences and Communication, UNIACC, the third of the Ponce Pinochet of his own free will began to become increasingly interested in business. She decided to study a diploma in business administration at the University of Berkeley and then an MBA at the Catholic University of Chile, and began to get involved in family societies with greater influence since 2017. A person who knows her says that in SQYA, the company parent company, did a very good job and became its general manager in 2021, a position she left in 2023 when she left to live in Canada. “He made a mistake [trabajo] very good at reducing, simplifying and improving that administration,” they say. Today it is preparing to take a more leading role. Everything indicates that at the next meeting in April the heiress will disembark in Las Cascadas as a representative of her father and it is not ruled out that she assumes a more managerial role. “Julio is organizing his succession,” says a person who knows the former president of SQM well, who also explains that if Francisca arrives in the Cascades she could perfectly carry out her role from Canada, where she has lived since last year. “She is the one who has the most «I have always worked in the company upstream in the Cascades and it is a process in which the family is becoming more integrated into the financial management of the businesses,» the same source tells this newspaper. In her new role, Francisca will not enter into the issues related to the operation of SQM. By law, the directors of the cascade companies cannot have access to information about the underlying asset, in this case the mining company. If that happened, explains a person who knows how these companies operate, it would be considered privileged information. Its role will rather be the financial management of companies, which considers, on the one hand, the payment of dividends and, on the other, the reduction of the debt they maintain. In its “premiere in society” last Tuesday at the BTG, her father introduced her to various Chilean businessmen and executives. “I found her very nice,” says one of the people who met her on that occasion. “She is a very nice person who understands, above all, the financial aspect of companies, but she is not focused on knowledge of SQM and its businesses,” explains someone who knows the responsibilities of the directors of these companies. His other brothers, according to an article in La Tercera, are Julio César, 53 years old, a commercial engineer from Regis University, who spends much of the year in Uruguay. The second is Alejandro Augusto, 52 years old, who lives in Chile and who presents himself as having a bachelor's degree in agricultural sciences; and Daniela, 40 years old, who studied service administration at the University of Los Andes and lives in the United States.
She is not uncomfortable being Pinochet's granddaughter
Granddaughter of Augusto Pinochet, Francisca grew up in a country marked by her grandfather's regime: she was born in the late 70s, in the first decade of the bloody dictatorship that lasted 17 years, since the military coup of September 11. from 1973 to March 11, 1990. As the Chilean justice system was able to determine, in addition, the dictator embezzled public funds during his mandate and hid the money in secret accounts in different banks in the United States, including Riggs, so the case is known to this day by that name: the Riggs case. But, according to those who know her, she has never been uncomfortable with being Pinochet's granddaughter and maintains good memories of her grandparents.Francisca was 27 years old when Pinochet died and 42 when her grandmother, Lucía Hiriart, died in 2021. That same year, her mother María Verónica Pinochet, the third of the Pinochet Hiriarts, rejected the inheritance and gave her daughter Francisca the power to make the decision whether or not to accept her grandmother's funds, of very controversial origin. According to the records of the Judicial Branch, in August 2022, the four Ponce Pinochet brothers repudiated the money and Francisca assumed a special mandate to change that resolution if deemed appropriate. Francisca's parents annulled their marriage in 1991 (in those years there was still no divorce law in Chile). She was only 11 years old, but despite the separation she was always very close to her father. They say that he listens to her a lot, trusts her and her decisions. According to a report by La Tercera, when Francisca moved to Canada last year she gave up the representation and management of SQYA, Inversiones SQ, SQ Grand Cayman, the family companies upstream of the waterfalls, to Caterina Dalbora Papa. She is a person she trusts, a former manager of an aeronautics company and a partner and administrator of the restaurant La Mia Pappa, a family-owned Italian food establishment that closed in 2010. Today she would be one of the people closest to the businesswoman who is beginning to take power within his family's businesses.
Litigation, coffee and triathlon
Very little is known about Francisca. She is reserved, with few friends – she is known as Pancha – and is seen as a close person. With a low public profile, the businesswoman has also ventured into small ventures. Between 2015 and 2018, she and her sister Daniela owned Mazzacone Coffee Bar & Pastry, a gourmet coffee shop and pastry shop located in the wealthy commune of Vitacura in Santiago. It was a business reviewed in several gastronomic publications that praised its style, which included a space for pets, as well as an emporium with coffee-making products. The cakes were baked by Daniela, while Francisca took charge of the administration. But the third of the Ponce Pinochet family has also been involved in conflicts. In 2014, the Llanquileo indigenous community took over 147 of the 972 hectares of the El Pafu farm, located in the Puyehue commune, in the Los Lagos region, in southern Chile. It is a property that is in the name of the businesswoman who filed a lawsuit in the 1st Court of Letters of Osorno, in which she claimed that there would be no ancestral rights over those lands. In October 2023, the court accepted Ponce's legal action and ordered the restitution of the usurped hectares. However, the community appealed and the case is currently lodged in the Court of Appeals of Valdivia, in the Los Ríos region. In her free time, Francisca enjoys the snow and sports: in recent years she began training to run triathlons, a practice that continues to develop from Canada. Now, after her arrival at the Cascades, she will begin to chart her other career in the business world. If everything goes well with the agreement between Codelco and SQM to exploit lithium from the Salar de Atacama – an agreement for which the Government of Gabriel Boric received criticism from its left wing -, Francisca Ponce Pinochet could become a partner of the Chilean State and in one of the most powerful women in the incipient and succulent business of the so-called white gold. Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS Chile newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the country.