Andrew Benedict.
Andrew Benedict was the second and last President of the Petroleum of Mexico Corporation. Benedict succeeded to control of P.M. in 1882 after the retirement of his uncle, company founder Monte Benedict.
Like Diego Cortez y Catalán, who succeeded to the Presidency of Kramer Associates earlier that year, Andrew Benedict lacked his predecessor's power and boldness. Monte Benedict and Cortez's predecessor, Bernard Kramer, had maneuvered to make Benito Hermión the dictator of the United States of Mexico. However, neither Cortez nor Andrew Benedict wished to keep Hermión under tight control. As long as Hermión allowed the two businessmen to have a free hand running their corporate oligarchy, they allowed him an equally free hand with political and military matters.
After Benedict succeed his uncle at P.M., Hermión announced that the U.S.M. was repudiating its French debts, and that the Mexican investments of Frenchmen who had sworn loyalty to the revolutionary French Republic would be confiscated. This presumably included the 29% interest in P.M. owned by Benedict's Paris bankers, which Hermión would have turned over to Benedict himself.
In 1883, Hermión introduced new taxes on corporations to pay for his social welfare program, the Free Society. However, both P.M. and K.A. were exempted from Hermión's new taxes, giving the two companies an even greater advantage over the rest of the Mexican business community. At the same time, Hermión forced Benedict and Cortez to sell the government a half interest in the Kinkaid Canal, which had finally begun to show a profit five years after opening.
In 1892, ten years after assuming control of P.M., Benedict agreed to a merger of the company with Kramer Associates. Sobel makes no further mention of Benedict after the merger, but presumably the Benedict family continued to play a major role in the merged entity, since Cortez chose Benedict's cousin, Douglas Benedict, to succeed him as president of K.A.
Sobel's sources for the business career of Andrew Benedict are James Mudd's The Hermión Regime: A Study in Corrupt Power (London, 1954); and Arnold Jackobson's Big Business in the Free Society (Melbourne, 1958).