ARCO Group

An affiliate of the Catholic workers' organization Beweging.net, formerly known as ACW, is the Belgian cooperative holding group known as ARCO Group. The group has 4.5 billion euros in capital and more than 900,000 shareholders. Auxipar mostly invests in real estate and the basic and utility service sectors (Elia, SPGE, Belgacom, Telenet, GIMV) while Arcofin primarily invests in the financial sector. (Retail Estates). Additionally, the group is a member of the nonprofit Procura and Syneco organizations as well as the cooperative Hefboom and Crédal. Francine Swiggers took over for Rik Branson as Chairman of the Management Board of the ARCO Group.

The Belgian novelist and attorney Drieu Godefridi published an opinion piece in 2016 on the website of the journal Le Vif in which he argued that the Belgian State's 600 million euro payment to ARCO cooperators was crony capitalism. In fact, after the failure of the Belgian bank Dexia, of which ARCO was one of the major shareholders and which served as the financial arm of the Algemeen Christelijk Werknemersverbond (Christian Workers' Movement in Flanders), a political party affiliated with the CD&V, the Leterme government, whose Prime Minister was Yves Leterme, extended the bank guarantee of 100,000 euros to ARCO's 780,000 cooperators, most of whom were Flemish.

Founded: 1935
Headquarters: Oscar Van Kesbeeckstraat 1, 2800 Mechelen
Website: https://www.arco.be/en