Companhia União Fabril

Companhia União Fabril was the largest concentration of economic power Portugal ever produced. Built up from 1898 by Alfredo da Silva and carried on by the Mello family, it grew under the long dictatorship of the Estado Novo into a conglomerate that touched nearly everything: the great chemical works at Barreiro, fertilisers and petrochemicals, tobacco, cement, beer, textiles, a major bank, an insurer, an oil-tanker line, and the Lisnave shipyards. At its height it ran more than 180 companies, employed over 110,000 people, and accounted for something like a twentieth of the entire Portuguese economy — large enough to be called the biggest group in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the largest in Europe.

It was killed by a revolution. When the Carnation Revolution overthrew the dictatorship in April 1974, the new left-leaning provisional governments nationalised the commanding heights of the economy, and in 1975 the entire CUF conglomerate passed to state control and was broken into separate state enterprises — the chemical arm becoming Quimigal, the shipyards and shipping lines becoming state bodies, the Mello family dispossessed. The group as a unified empire simply ceased to exist. The family later rebuilt and, in the privatisations of the 1990s, bought back the chemical business and revived the “CUF” name; today it marks a chemicals firm and a hospital network. But those are separate companies wearing an old brand. The thing that was once the spine of Portuguese industry died with the revolution.