Stephan Schmidheiny, GrupoNueva's founder and former principal stockholder, is keenly interested in Latin American development. His family has made significant investments in the region since the 1930s, and he main-tained its business interests and added to them by diversifying operations and opening up new business areas such as forestry. He also began the AVINA Foundation, which since 1994 has been supporting sustainable development leadership in the region (www.avina.org). He established FUNDES, an organization promoting the better performance of small and medium-sized businesses (www.fundes.org).

In 1998, Stephan Schmidheiny charged Julio Moura, GrupoNueva's current president, with creating a consolidated corporation based on the different businesses he owned. His explicit instructions were to ensure the companies' commitment to the business philosophy of sustainable development. In 2000, the group's Board of Directors approved the creation of the office of Vice President, Social and Environmental Responsibility, at the corporate level, in charge of overseeing all group businesses. It also approved the 2000-2005 sustainable development strategy on which we have been reporting to our stakeholders through our sustainability reports published since 2002.

On October 9, 2003, Stephan Schmidheiny announced his decision to donate all of the GrupoNueva stock to the VIVA Trust. The dividends generated by the group for this new stockholder are earmarked for the promotion of sustainable development throughout Ibero-America, especially through the work being done by the AVINA Foundation.

For further information visit: www.stephanschmidheiny.com