Gildo Pallanca Pastor: “turning an impossible dream into reality”
A dreamer who keeps his feet firmly on the ground in Monaco and his eyes trained… on the stars © Gildo Pastor
The wealthy Monegasque entrepreneur has been through it all. Hell, with the brutal murder of his mother, Hélène Pastor, while he was recovering from a double stroke. Resurrection, with the success of Venturi’s electric adventure. And glory, more recently, with the rover developed by Venturi having been selected by NASA and SpaceX to go to the Moon in the near future. We take a look at a dreamer who keeps his feet firmly on the ground in Monaco and his eyes trained… on the stars.
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“What I’m interested in is turning an impossible dream into reality. I like crazy, unconventional, extraordinary projects.” Some people are born into the world of entrepreneurship and Gildo Pallanca Pastor is certainly one of them.
Innovation, technology, challenges… the Monegasque businessman’s life has been a succession of incredible ventures, woven together by passions, encounters, shared adventures, dreams and successes. Whether in business (real estate, restaurants, radio), motoring and speed, or exploring the world’s most inhospitable regions, Gildo Pallanca Pastor excels at all of it.
Flying Monaco’s flag all the way… even as far as the Moon.
Back to planet Earth meanwhile. And Monaco, specifically. It’s 1985 and Gildo, just 18, is buzzing. He is about to launch his first company, specialising in property renovations. As he was too young at the time to be the legal head of the company, he was obliged to register it in his parents’ names.
No matter: “at 18, I already had a strong desire to take an interest in the world around us,” the businessman recalls. “That first experience wasn’t just a business venture, it also meant independence from the family.”
Three years later, Gildo oversaw the construction of the 90,000 square metre Gildo Pastor Centre, still the largest office complex in the Principality.
Origins of the Pastor dynasty
The building is named in honour of another Gildo Pastor, the young man’s grandfather, who he remembers as “a very intelligent but also very likeable person. A true visionary and a hard worker. He has always been an example to me.” Gildo Pastor is best known as the man who cemented the Pastor dynasty’s standing in the Monegasque landscape.
His own father, Jean-Baptiste Pastor, came to Monaco in 1880. A stonemason by profession, he went into the building trade and quickly won a number of lucrative contracts – including the construction of the Principality’s first stadium in the late 1930s – before handing over the reins to his son Gildo in the aftermath of the Second World War.
With a real gift for business, Gildo Pastor pulled off a number of real estate deals that would ensure his family’s fortune for several generations. When he died in 1990, Gildo Pallanca Pastor’s grandfather had made his clan one of the most prominent in the Principality.
Measuring over 500,000 square metres, the entrepreneur left his three children – Victor, Hélène and Michel – a property portfolio worth around €19 billion. A fortune that unlocks all manner of possibilities… but also, unfortunately, all manner of ambitions and jealousies, as fate would soon show the younger Pastor generations.
The assassination of Hélène Pastor: a judicial, family and personal tragedy
On 6 May 2014, Hélène Pastor – Gildo Pastor’s daughter and Gildo Pallanca Pastor’s mother – visited her son’s bedside, as she did every day. He was recovering at the Larchet hospital, having suffered a stroke a few months previously. As she left the building, the heiress was shot at point-blank range by a man who had been waiting for her in the car park. Hélène Pastor died of her injuries on the night of 20-21 May, ten days after her driver, who had also been targeted by the killer.
In Monaco and well beyond, the reaction to the double murder was commensurate with the fame and fortune of the Pastor family. The shockwaves were massive. Who could have wanted to kill the heiress of one of Monte Carlo’s most powerful families?
Investigators quickly identified and arrested the gunman and his accomplice, two young Comorian men from Marseille. They told the police that they had acted on the orders of Wojciech Janowski, partner of Sylvia Ratkowski, Hélène’s own daughter. He confessed, but later recanted his statement.
When the trial opened on September 17, 2018 at Aix-en-Provence, there were ten defendants in the dock. Janowski was ultimately sentenced to life in prison, a sentence upheld on appeal in 2021. “This affair has shattered my world,” said Gildo Pallanca Pastor at the second trial, by which time he was at last in better health. And determined to fight for justice for his mother.
Brasserie de Monaco and Radio Monaco: ventures that are “deeply rooted in the Principality”
Justice was done. But sadly, it doesn’t have the power to mend broken hearts or families torn apart by tragedy. “The Pastor clan distanced itself from me,” Gildo told Paris Match : “I left with my wife and sons for New York, where I found doctors who taught me how to walk and talk again. I went back to my businesses.”
And what businesses they are. Gildo really knows what he’s doing. From the early 1990s onward, the young entrepreneur was one of the forerunners of the “business angels” movement in Europe, investing in dozens of companies, mostly in the automotive or environmental sectors. Without ever renouncing or forgetting his Monegasque roots, however.
In 2008 Gildo started up the Brasserie de Monaco, producing a new Monegasque beer, and reviving a tradition that had been lost for over a century. Ideally located on Port Hercule, the brewery gradually grew into a local institution, while continuing to produce exceptional beers that regularly win awards.
Gildo Pallanca Pastor is also the founder of Radio Monaco (formerly Radio MC One), which has been broadcasting electro-pop since the 1990s and has recently acquired a state-of-the-art studio: “through our constant quest for innovation,” said Gildo, “we are able to offer an immersive and modern experience, while remaining firmly rooted in the Principality, close to its prominent figures, its major events and its vibrant current affairs.”
A passion for cars
But Gildo’s real love is sport, cars and speed. Fabulous engines. Challenges. Adrenalin. Although the young man quickly realised that he lacked that ‘certain something’ to be able to compete on a par with the legends of Formula 1, disappointment didn’t make him turn away from the track; quite the contrary.
He clung to his dream, wth a respectable career as a driver – Porsche Supercup, Volant Elf, Rally-Raid, Renault Europa Cup, Paris-Dakar, 24 Hours at Daytona, etc. – meeting some of the greatest names in motor racing along the way.
In the mid-1990s, Gildo set himself a new challenge: to break the world ice speed record. He succeeded on 3 March 1995, behind the wheel of a Bugatti EB110 racing at 315 kph across icy Finnish seas. It was a moment of grace, with the car seemingly weightless on the ice; “such huge joy,” he recalls with emotion.
He never lost the car bug. In July 2000, Gildo Pallanca Pastor bought French sports car manufacturer Venturi. “Out of the 35 bids, mine was the lowest”, he recalls, somewhat mischievously, “but I was the only one who said I was moving everything to Monaco.”
Acknowledging that he “always wanted to build an electric car,” Gildo recalls that when he “raced against Venturis, (he) noticed a lot of very interesting things, but there was no innovative drive.” Duly noted. By choosing to go 100% electric before anyone else, the entrepreneur turned the brand around and put his cars with their evocative names – the Fetish, the Volage, the America, the Eclectic and the Astrolab – on the racetracks, where they were soon breaking successive records: world speed record in an electric vehicle (549 kph), record with a hydrogen vehicle (487 kph), etc.
In March 2019 came the crowning achievement: on the Formula E (for Electric) circuit in Hong Kong, driver Edoardo Mortara earned the Venturi team the top step on the podium, a historic win for Monegasque sport.
At the same time as his electric cars were conquering the world, Gildo Pallanca Pastor turned his attention to electric motorbikes. In 2010, he acquired French manufacturer Voxan, which was in receivership at the time.
“Urban mobility involves two-wheel, three-wheel and four-wheel vehicles. At Venturi, we are just as interested in delivery vehicles as we are in sports cars”: guided by his intuition, Gildo found success again, with the Voxan Wattman, ridden by six-time world motorbike champion Max Biaggi, setting over ten world records in the over-300 kg category. And in August, the under-150 kg version of the Voxan established four new records on Bonneville Salt Lake (USA): “what a fabulous gift to mark the 15th anniversary of our partnership!” with Ohio University, Gildo was pleased to announce at the time.
From polar ice to lunar plains: the Venturi adventure continues in space
Although the Venturi Racing team was sold to an American investment fund in December 2020, Gildo kept his job and was able to keep the headquarters of “Monegasque’s only racing team” in Monaco. But the Venturi adventure is far from over.
An adventurer at heart, Pastor spent a long time working on an idea that Prince Albert II himself suggested to him: to invent an electric vehicle for polar exploration. In 2021, Prince Albert II was shown the new Venturi Antartica – the first prototype having been tested two years earlier by the Sovereign himself in the freezing cold of Canada.
It’s a technological feat for a unique, environmentally-responsible vehicle that allows scientists at the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Station to access areas they are studying without polluting their working environment, in extreme temperatures that can drop to -50°C.
Conditions not unlike those in… space. After the icy expanses of the poles – where a member of the Venturi group carried out an expedition in 2022 as a tribute to the great discoverer Prince Albert I – Gildo Pallanca Pastor is now taking on the cosmos.
First, the Moon: now established in the United States (Venturi Astrolab), Switzerland (Venturi Lab) and Monaco, the group has developed a brand new lunar rover, fitted with revolutionary technologies such as deformable wheels and the ability to withstand radiation.
Named FLEX, the vehicle has been chosen both by SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, to be sent to the lunar south pole, and by NASA, as part of its Artemis project, which aims to send astronauts back to Earth’s satellite by 2026. A double accolade for Gildo Pallanca Pastor, who has put Venturi and Monegasque expertise on the world map.
Going down in history
“Over the last two decades, the Venturi Group has developed some very advanced and truly unique electric vehicles,” said Gildo last year: “the time has come to go one step further and write the Venturi Group into the history books. After the mission, this rover will be the biggest and most powerful to ever have been sent to the Moon.”
“Nobody, including me, could have imagined that we would be applying our industrial prowess on TWO planets!” said Gildo at the Venturi Group’s 20th anniversary.
Chairman of the Environment and Sustainable Development section of Monaco’s Economic and Social Council until 2015, Knight of the Order of Saint-Charles, Knight of the Legion of Honour (awarded by FIA President Jean Todt) and Consul General of Monaco in New York, Gildo Pastor admits that going to the Moon is “the biggest project of (his) professional life”. When will we see a Monegasque flag on the Moon, we wonder?