Amancio Ortega family office Pontegadea exits Portuguese grid operator REN

Pontegadea Inversiones, S.L. has sold its entire holding in REN, Redes Energéticas Nacionais, to Parpública, the Portuguese state holding company. The transaction covers 91,723,676 ordinary shares of one euro nominal value, or 13.7 per cent of REN’s capital and voting rights. The agreement was signed on 14 August 2026, the Portuguese Court of Auditors approved it on 31 August, and the transfer settled on 7 September, taking Pontegadea from 13.7 per cent to zero. Parpública crossed the 5 and 10 per cent thresholds but remains below one third, so no mandatory takeover bid is triggered. Neither party has published a price; Portuguese press reports put it at around 380 million euros. REN operates Portugal’s very-high-voltage electricity transmission network and its natural gas transmission system, together with the country’s LNG terminal and underground storage, and holds international assets including stakes in Transemel, Electrogas and Cahora Bassa. The exit ends a five-year position for Pontegadea and returns a strategically sensitive grid asset to state ownership, a reversal of the privatisation trend that brought foreign capital into southern European utilities after 2011.

About Pontegadea: The Amancio Ortega family office

Pontegadea Inversiones, S.L. is the investment holding of Amancio Ortega Gaona, the founder of Inditex, the Spanish group behind Zara. It is registered in A Coruña in Galicia, and its own regulatory filings name Ortega as the ultimate controlling person of the chain of companies through which its holdings are owned. Pontegadea is best known as one of the largest private property owners in Europe, with prime commercial and residential buildings in Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, Miami, Chicago, Toronto and Seoul, and it has spent the past decade adding regulated infrastructure to that base. Energy and telecoms network stakes have been the clearest expression of that shift, bought for their inflation-linked, regulated cash flows rather than for control. The REN position fitted that pattern and its disposal to a state buyer illustrates the main risk attached to it, namely that a government can decide a transmission network belongs in public hands and is willing to pay to bring it back.

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Article Source: REN / CMVM filing [September 8, 2026]