Héctor Magnetto

Born in Chivilcoy in 1944, he owns 29.8% of Grupo Clarín’s stock and is the majority shareholder of Cablevisión Holdings. The other shareholders of Grupo Clarín include siblings Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera (each holding 24.85%), José Antonio Aranda (10.3%) and Lucio Pagliaro (10.2%).

Magnetto started to work in newspaper Clarín in 1972, together with his friends (and today Grupo Clarín’s shareholders) Lucio Pagliaro and José Aranda, who studied accounting at Universidad Nacional de La Plata with him. Magnetto’s career in the administrative area of Clarín was sponsored by the frondicismo (a pro-development political current to which the newspaper’s founder, Roberto Noble, belonged to; when Noble died, Magnetto took over the company’s management, whose formal director was Ernestina Herrera, Noble’s wife).

His rise in Clarín was already visible in 1977, when he played a key role in the talks that resulted in the partnership between Clarín, La Nacion, La Razón and Argentina’s National State to purchase Papel Prensa during the military dictatorship. The historical purchase took place immediately after Liliana Papaleo, widow of Papel Prensa’s former owner David Graiver, had been dispossessed of her stock in the newsprint factory.

In 1980 Ernestina Herrera removed the old pro-development members of Clarín, and Magnetto’s role became more prominent. A shareholder and a senior executive, he led the newspaper’s transformation into a multimedia group and the subsequent group’s endeavor in the telecoms sector. Today, the group is the leader of a conglomerate that ranks among the main economic holdings in Argentina.