Sociedad Comercial del Plata was founded in
Buenos Aires on June 7, 1927, and became a holding company with varied interests, primarily
real estate. Francisco Soldati (a nephew of
José Francisco Soldati, the owner of the city's largest utility, the Italian-Argentine Electric Company, and founder of the
Villa Lugano ward of Buenos Aires) bought controlling interest in SCP in 1965, and expanded the company into
petroleum transport; he ultimately lost his life in a November 1979 bombing carried out by the far-left
Montoneros terrorist group, in one of their last attacks. His son, Francisco, became President of SCP in 1976. SCP remained focused on its fuel and electricity, and established a realty, Del Plata Propiedades, though the group's growth was hampered by the debt and inflation crisis in the local economy during the 1980s. The younger Francisco Soldati died in a
polo accident in April 1991. Soldati invested part of SCP's earnings into two tourist attractions: the
Tren de la Costa railway, and the
Parque de la Costa amusement park. The first was developed by securing a concession in 1993 to operate the formerly state-owned
Ferrocarril Central Argentino route between the northern Buenos Aires suburbs of
Olivos and
Tigre, in disuse since 1961. Following the recovery of derelict rails and stations, and the purchase of new equipment, the 16 km (10 mi) "Coastal Train" was inaugurated in April 1995, helping revive the largely upscale area's real estate market. As the largest shareholder in Aguas Argentinas (with 20 percent), SCP profited by Soldati's decision in 1998 to sell its stake to
Paris-based
Suez, which paid SCP US$150 million for its shares, or three times what Soldati's company had paid in 1993. The sale of the profitable unit was partly motivated by growing debts at SCP, however, whose revenue forecast was dampened by the local effects during 1995-96 of the
Mexican peso crisis. Its US$715 million debt was nearly double its
book value, and in 1997, SCP divested itself of the
natural gas processing concerns had under its Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC) unit for US$230 million, most of which had to be earmarked for debt retirement. Negotiations with creditors followed, but a lawsuit filed against SCP by US-based Reef Exploration in 2000 over the sale of a subsidiary to
Shell Petroleum led to Soldati's decision to file for SCP's bankruptcy in September of that year. The sale of a number of energy related interests to
Techint, the Argentine multinational registered in
Luxembourg, could not rescue SCP from bankruptcy, and in 2004, Soldati divested it of 81% of its CGC unit, which was sold to local household chemicals maker The Value Brand. That year, SCP's bankruptcy was approved in court, which granted it an 80% discharge of a debt which had grown to US$1.2 billion, by then. The discharge allowed SCP to enter into a modest venture with
Millicom, a Luxembourg-based mobile phone network provider, which resulted in Latin America's first
WiMax network. SCP's legal problems continued, however, as the bankruptcy ruling had been appealed by a commercial court prosecutor in 2006, and in October 2009, the
Argentine Supreme Court struck down the earlier ruling, citing irregularities in the
shareholders' meeting convened to approve the bankruptcy. as the new one. ==References==