The Luxembourg fund "European Future Media Investments", backed by the Portuguese investment group Alpac Capital, arranged the purchase of the media operating within the United Group, Raskrikanje published. As stated, Pedro Vargas David and Afonso Guerra are listed as the buyer's contact persons in the contract.
As stated in his biography, Pedro Vargas David is the CEO of Alpac Capital. Between 2006 and 2010, he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, he writes New economy.
Currently, in addition to the director of Alpac Capital, he is also an associate professor for emerging markets, as well as the president of the Executive Board at the Nova School of Business and Communications, where he himself graduated in economics. Also, since December 2022, he is a member of the Council of the Portuguese Diaspora.
Alpac Capital is a company that in 2022 bought a majority stake in the Euronews channel, a pan-European news channel that broadcasts programs in more than 12 languages, and which also operates in Serbia.
Also, as Raskrikavanje writes, the name of Pedro Vargas David was often linked to Viktor Orbán in foreign media. Research by the Hungarian portal Direkt36, in cooperation with the French Le Monde and the Portuguese Expres, showed that the purchase of Euronews was partly financed by Hungarian state capital, but also by companies close to Viktor Orbán's propaganda machine.
According to the documents obtained by these media, 45 million euros were provided by the Hungarian state investment fund Széchenyi Funds, while additional financing came through the company New Land Media, whose owner is Gyula Balassi - a businessman whose companies have been receiving lucrative state jobs in Hungary for years.
Raskrikanvane announced that leaked internal documents also stated that one of the goals of the investment was to "mitigate left-wing bias" in the media.
RSE previously reported that the father of the director of Euronews, Mario David, is a right-wing politician who was a member of the European Parliament, Orbán's adviser on issues related to the European Union, as well as the vice-president of the European People's Party.
According to the media, in addition to his role in Alpac Capital, Pedro Vargas David often appears as a speaker at international forums on developing markets, where he advocates the position that capital from the EU should be more actively directed towards Southeast Europe and Africa as "untapped growth areas".
In the part of international media and financial analyses, Vargas David is also mentioned in the context of Alpac Capital's strategy to invest in "mid-size" media systems with regional influence, rather than in global media giants, which is interpreted as a model of spreading influence through localized information networks.
Source: New Economy
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