A Portuguese full professor has handed his latest Expresso column—in Portugal's leading weekly—to Sir Chris Hohn, the British billionaire one of the world’s most successful investors and a revealing symbol of today’s monopoly-driven capitalism. The title alone draws blood: "One of the world's biggest investors only invests in companies that abuse their market power." The question underneath it is just as pointed: how has Hohn, backed by a team you could fit around a dinner table—barely half a dozen analysts—wrung extraordinary returns out of roughly USD 77 billion parked in just 15 ferociously concentrated bets? https://expresso.pt/opiniao/2026-05-28-o-poder-de-mercado-exposto-no-aeroporto-de-lisboa-a2723d55
The answer is as simple as it is damning. Hohn's genius isn't spotting well-run companies. Anyone can do that. His genius is spotting companies that never have to be especially well-run, because they're insulated from real competition by infrastructure they control, regulation that shields them, market concentration that strangles rivals, and barriers to entry so high that the textbook version of capitalism—the one with competitors, price discipline, and consumer choice—simply doesn't apply. He doesn't beat the market. He buys the parts of the economy where the market has been switched off.
For Portuguese readers, the irony is brutal. One of the crown jewels of Hohn's universe is the French multinational VINCI. For Portuguese readers, the irony is not merely brutal; it is obscene. At the height of the Troika intervention, when a financially strangled Portugal was compelled, under financial coercion, to privatise strategic public assets to satisfy the conditions of its bailout, VINCI acquired ANA — Aeroportos de Portugal, a 50-year concession over the country’s ten airports for just €3.08 billion. By 2024 that single concession had already thrown off some €2.3 billion in profit. By estimates aired in the Portuguese debate, it could ultimately yield more than €20 billion across the life of the contract. Put plainly: the buyer may recover the entire purchase price several times over.
This is where the fairy tale of free-market capitalism dies. Hohn’s success is not the heroic victory of a brilliant investor defeating competitors in open markets. It is the much darker art of spotting where governments have removed competition, locked the public into dependence, and converted essential infrastructure into private tribute machines. He is not beating the market. He is cashing in on markets that were already strangled before the game began.
So Portugal's airports are not merely a lucrative line on VINCI's balance sheet. They are a near-perfect monument to capitalism gone feral: strategic national infrastructure sold off too cheaply, converted into a private cash machine, and left to enrich distant shareholders for half a century while the citizens who funded it pay the monopoly premium for the privilege of using what was once theirs. Which leaves one uncomfortable question, and it deserves a blunt answer: how many public assets do we have to surrender before we stop dignifying this as capitalism and start calling it what it is—organised plunder, conducted in daylight?
