Last Monday we met our Strategic Council for the first time. It’s not a detail, Caixa Agrícola de Torres Vedras is proud to be the first to include an advisory board in its bodies. The work went on throughout the day and, I shamelessly confess to you, I found myself thinking that the journey I have taken has been worth it.
It is not just any Strategic Council. They are people with a top career path, most with careers that have no direct connection with cooperativism, but with the intuition that the financial system will benefit if it looks at our business model in a different way. In a volatile world, cooperativism is living proof of security, predictability, proximity and expectations. It has been an extraordinary year, perhaps the best in our 110-year history. And in more than a century, several giants have called us dwarfs, but the truth is that dinosaurs became extinct unlike other, smaller beings, who survived because they had in their identity a matrix that protected them from storms.
Our Strategic Council fills me with satisfaction. Because none of the elements that make it up would accept being integrated into it without the guarantee that we are at the forefront of cooperative action and thinking. See Maria Celeste Hagatong, former president of Banco de Fomento Português and one of the first women to occupy leadership positions in the financial system, alongside João Costa Pinto, former Vice-Governor of the BdP and former president of Caixa Central – watching them knowing that part of history, even the relationship with the East, passed through them.
See Luis Campos e Cunha, also former deputy governor of the BDP and former Minister of Finance and the first to denounce that King Sócrates was naked. Realizing with pride that the young and talented businesswoman Mariana Santos listened with interest and humility to António Saraiva, the forever boss of bosses. Inwardly thanking that influential figures, such as the CEO of Ernst & Young, Miguel Farinha or Sandra Mateus, Senior Industry Advisor at Microsoft, made a point of staying until the end of the work. As did Manuel Bio, president of Grupo Abegoaria, one of the largest wine production and marketing groups. Or Susana Santos, a great figure at El Corte Inglés. Or Pedro Rebelo de Sousa, master of governance masters. Or Isabelle Oliveira, professor at the Sorbonne, or Joaquim Ferreira, immensely cited professor, leading doctor and ideologist of the Senior Neurological Campus, an extraordinary project that makes Torres Vedras proud. Or Elvira Fortunato, our eternal candidate for the Nobel and Pessoa Prize. Or Duarte Pitta Ferraz, one of the professionals in Portugal who knows the most about banking. Or Jorge Rebelo de Almeida, founder and president of the Vila Galé hotel empire.
And António José dos Santos, President Emeritus of Caixa Agrícola de Torres. The person from whom I learned the most and who had no doubt that the path to cooperativism involved this idea of thinking, redefining and attacking the future with hope, conviction and a future project. This week has left me happy and comforted. Therefore, I wanted to share with you that here you read that bojadores are always a good hope if we don’t give up on our convictions and this idea of good.
President of the Torres Vedras Mutual Agricultural Credit Bank
manuel.guerreiro@ccamtv.pt