Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Peter Abeles
Abeles was born in Vienna, in Austria, but grew up in Budapest. When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Abeles, who was Jewish, was sent to a Nazi work camp. He later became a cabaret entrepreneur, working in Romania, where in 1947 he met and married his first wife, Claire Dan, a cabaret performer. In 1949 they fled the devastation left by World War II, and moved to Australia. After doing small business by selling books and clothing, he quickly befriended George Rockey, a fellow Hungarian immigrant. The pair bought two trucks, which they named "Samson" and "Delilah," and set up a transport company, "Alltrans." In 1967, Alltrans merged with Thomas Nationwide Transport, and the combined companies became TNT Ltd.. Under Abeles' guidance as managing director, TNT quickly expanded, and by the 1980s had established a presence in 180 countries and was termed "the second biggest transport empire in the world, operating by road, rail, sea and air".