PERSONAL FILE

sbUnlike the many Latin American businessmen who salt their money away in Swiss banks, tall, courtly Alfredo Fortabat, 68, one of Argentina's richest men, is renowned for free-spending philanthropy. He has built many kindergartens and schools, and this week will dedicate a new Fortabat-financed technical college for 600 students. He learned his philanthropy from his father, a wealthy rancher who told him: "Never forget generosity, tolerance and good community spirit." Fortabat amassed his own immense fortune himself by working a 6 a.m.-to-11 p.m. day building a $100 million chain of four factories that produce 55% of Argentina's cement, and a string of ranches on which 150,000 cattle graze. Like so many other Latin American businessmen, however, Fortabat is shy of spending money on research. "We do not try to invent," he says, "but use the experience of other countries."

sbTo Britons, a move by U.S.-owned Monsanto Chemical Co. to set up an executive office in Brussels to guide its twelve European operations marks a disturbing trend by U.S. firms to shun Britain for the Continent. The British found some consolation in Monsanto's denial of such an intention, and in the company's choice of a Yorkshireman as boss of its new office: energetic Peter Weston-Webb, 56. Weston-Webb started as a textile weaver's apprentice, worked for textile companies in Canada and South America" before joining Monsanto's Chemstrand division in 1959 as head of its British subsidiary. Monsanto needs his expertise in tight management to solve the problem of directing the expansion of its $100 million European holdings from its distant St. Louis headquarters. Says Weston-Webb: "We don't have any inhibitions about where we may go or grow."

sbThe prophetic little poem in a German magazine in the 1930s ran: "But win or lose, the war once past,/ Be sure Herr Schacht won't suffer." Hitler's stiff-necked financial wizard, Brooklyn-born Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, 86, has certainly not suffered. He was acquitted three times of war-crime charges, wrote a bestseller on his services to Hitler, and sold economic advice to such as Indonesia's Sukarno and Iran's Mossadegh ("In three hours, Teheran's problems were settled," boasted the imperious Schacht). At the end of March, he will retire from the private Duesseldorf bank that he founded in 1953, taking his name away from the firm too. He intends to keep adding to his wealth, has an agreement with Algeria to show one more confused new nation how to solve its economic difficulties.

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