Luis Sarmiento is a Colombian construction businessman and banker. According to Forbes magazine (2016 edition), he ranked first as the richest billionaire in Colombia and 124th in the world. His fortune is estimated at a net worth of $10.5 billion (2017). He is the president of the holding Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores, S.A., of which he owns more than 90% of the shares, and is also the owner of the Organización Sarmiento Angulo.
Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo was born in January 1933 in Bogotá, in the home of Eduardo Sarmiento Pulido and Georgina Angulo. He is the second youngest of nine siblings.
Educated in public institutions, he graduated from Colegio Mayor San Bartolomé, where he was an outstanding student.
At the age of fourteen, he discovered what he calls his second profession: accounting. His love for numbers and discipline in perfecting his knowledge was so strong that a friend of his father hired him at that young age to manage the accounts of his business. This is how he began to earn his first pesos, which he used to achieve economic stability.
At the age of 19, Luis Carlos Sarmiento entered the Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Colombia, obtaining tenth place in the entrance exam out of four hundred applicants. In his fourth year of university, he worked as an engineering assistant at the company Cuéllar Serrano Gómez, then as a geodesy calculator at the Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute, and later as a field engineer at the firm Santiago Berrío y Cía.
In December 1950, he met the woman who has been by his side for more than 61 years, Fanny Gutiérrez de las Casas. From the beginning, they got along well and began dating, often meeting in parks near their homes. They married in January 1955, and from this union five children were born: María Claudia, Luz Ángela, Adriana, Luis Carlos, and Sonia.
When he graduated as a civil engineer, with the highest grades of his class, he obtained a scholarship to study at Cornell University, which he postponed while saving to support his new family abroad.
His performance as a field engineer made him the right hand of Santiago Berrío, who died as a victim of violence. After Berrío’s death, his family entrusted the liquidation of the company to Luis Carlos, who decided to remain in the country, sacrificing his studies abroad. Later, in 1957, with the $10,000 from the liquidation, Sarmiento began his career as an independent contractor.
At just 23 years old, he opened his engineering and construction firm, betting on contracts in violent areas that no one else wanted. In 1959, the young Sarmiento created the Organización Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, which was soon joined by partners Enrique Santamaría, René Salazar, and Luis Hoyos. Under Sarmiento’s leadership, by 1975 the organization had become the largest housing construction firm in Bogotá.
With great vision, in 1971 he entered the financial sector by founding Seguros Alfa. Almost at the same time, he bought Banco de Occidente, which was a regional bank on the verge of bankruptcy. His leadership transformed it into the successful company we know today. In 1972, Sarmiento Angulo founded the Corporación de Ahorro y Vivienda Las Villas. Thus began a rapid career in the financial world that included, in the mid-1980s, the acquisition of control of Banco de Bogotá.
In the 1990s, he founded the pension fund administrator Porvenir and created ATH, the ATM network of Grupo Aval. He also acquired a majority stake in Banco Popular and Corporación de Ahorro y Vivienda Ahorramás, which later merged with Las Villas in 2002 to become Banco AV Villas.
In 1998, he decided to consolidate most of the financial assets of the organization under a single entity called Grupo Aval. Today, Grupo Aval controls the banks Bogotá, Occidente, Popular, and AV Villas, and their subsidiaries, including Corficolombiana and Porvenir.
Sarmiento Angulo has carried out three successful public offerings of Grupo Aval shares, and today has more than 130,000 shareholders.
In December 2010, he closed the largest deal ever made by a Colombian company abroad: the purchase of the leading financial group in Central America, BAC – Credomatic.
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