Grupo Villar Mir (GVM) has sold its 7.09% stake in OHLA, ending a journey that began 36 years ago, when Juan Miguel Villar Mir bought Obrascón and merged it with Huarte to create OHL. The need to reduce debt has been reducing GVM’s positions in the construction company, first in favor of the Mexican Amodio family and now, of a Monaco fund.

According to the records of the CNMV, Inmobiliaria Espacio, which is the company through which GVM participated in OHLA, has sold 41.9 million shares to the Monegasque fund Tyrus Capital, controlled by Antoine Georges Chedraui and with the parent domiciled in in Luxembourg.

At market price, the operation barely has a value of 24 million euros. OHLA’s shares rose 4.9% on the stock market today, up to 354 million euros. The company is now worth 30 times less than a decade ago, when it reached 10.6 billion euros. The current managers are working on a plan to recover its value.

Juan Miguel Villar Mir, born in 1931 and Minister of Finance between 1975 and 1976, during the Carlos Arias Navarro stage, bought with other investors in 1987 from Altos Hornos de Vizcaya the construction company Obrascón, which would first merge with Huarte from Navarre and, in 1999, with Lain, which gave rise to OHL (Obrascón Huarte Lain).

GVM maintained a stake of more than 50% in the company until 2018, when debts forced it to sell a large part of the stake to the Mexican Martín Amodio family. The brothers Luis Fernando and Julio Mauricio Martín Amodio now have 25.9% of the capital and share 50% of the voting rights in the company, to whose acronym they have incorporated their last name, so that it is now called OHLA.

OHLA lost 96 million euros in 2022 after registering a value impairment of 34.5 million related to its participation in the Canalejas project in the center of Madrid, which includes a hotel and twenty luxury homes, as well as a shopping center commercial.

To straighten out the business, the company has proposed launching a divestment plan with which to reduce gross debt to below 2.5 times gross operating profit (ebitda).

The 50% stake in the Canalejas project, together with other assets such as those in the service area, are part of the assets included in this divestment plan.