Residents of a small Spanish village have denied recent reports that every resident was left €2m (A$3.36m) by the late Corona founder Antonio Fernandez in his will.
The reports claimed that the founder of the Mexican beer giant, Corona, who passed away in August, left €169 million (A$284m) to the 80 residents of Cerezales del Condado, the small Spanish village in which Fernandez spent his childhood.
Despite recent reports from news agencies including: The Daily Mail, The Metro, and Business Insider, that the late Corona founder left millions of dollars to each of the small town’s residents, the communication director at Cerezales del Condado’s cultural centre denied the story. Lucia Alaejos, told Buzz Feed News that the reports of Fernandez’s generosity to her and her fellow town members were incorrect, but rather that he did a lot for the town of his birth during his life.
“I’m afraid I have to deny this specific fact, the information that has been published is not correct,” she said.
“It seems the someone got the wrong end of the stick and the story has just grown and grown, it’s got completely out of hand.”
Corona founder was still generous
Whilst he didn’t make the town’s residents instant multi-millionaires, Alaejos said Fernandez did a lot for the village whilst he was alive rather than after his death, including donating money to the town’s cultural centre and churches, as well as founding the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, the town’s art and culture centre.
Residents of the small Spanish town are said to be bewildered by the international attention, with many news agencies running with the story of the late beer mogul donating millions to his childhood town, false reports which may have been due to mistranslated articles published by Spanish-anguage outlets which emphasised Fernandez’s altruistic nature in their reports following his death in August.
Hernandez was born into poverty 1917 and brought up in the tiny village of Cerezales del Condado in the province of Leon in north-west Spain.
Fernandez immigrated to Mexico in 1949 at the age of 32 after his wife’s’ uncle offered him a job to work for a brewery, Grupo Modelo, where he founded the Corona beer.
The Spaniard then worked his way up the ranks of the Grupo Modelo brewery to become the company’s CEO in 1971.
The beer magnate’s business acumen helped to turn Corona into one of the best selling beers in the world, with current annual sales of (US)$693m (£556m).
Fernandez remained CEO until 1997 and Chairman of the Board until 2005 before handing over both roles to his nephew.
The Corona founder was acknowledged for his charity work which involved setting up a company to help finds jobs for disabled people in Spain and Mexico.
