Aníbal Mosa

Yakob Aníbal Mosa Shmes (born 6 April 1967) is a Syrian-born Chilean entrepreneur and football executive who has served, on three separate occasions, as president of Blanco y Negro S.A., the board concessionaire that manages the Club Social y Deportivo Colo-Colo.

Early life Mosa was born in Qamishli, a city in northeastern Syria near the Turkish border, the son of Aziz Mosa, a taxi driver, and Emel Schmes. He and his family—his parents and his two siblings, Jack and Fabiola—immigrated to Chile on 26 September 1973, arriving in the country days after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.

Both of Mosa's parents died in separate car accidents during his youth: his mother in 1984, at age 37, and his father in 1986, when Mosa was 19. By his own account, he pursued the purchase after seeing a televised interview in which Piñera announced plans to sell his shares in the club, prompting Mosa to contact his financial adviser, Paul Fontaine, to negotiate on his behalf.

In 2015, following the company's shareholder meeting, Mosa was elected to succeed Arturo Salah as president of Blanco y Negro.

In 2019, Mosa brought former ANFP president Harold Mayne-Nicholls onto the board as one of the three directors his shareholding entitled him to appoint, and was re-elected president of Blanco y Negro, defeating an opposing faction by a vote of five to four with the support of the two directors representing the Club Social.

In 2020, a dispute over reductions to players' salaries, following public statements from both sides, triggered a wider conflict between the concessionaire and the squad; the episode became the club's most serious institutional crisis in years and nearly resulted in Colo-Colo's relegation for the first time in its history. Mosa has said that Colo-Colo's finances deteriorated sharply in the years before this crisis, with the club's cash reserves falling from roughly 12 billion Chilean pesos to around 500 million pesos between 2010 and 2014 amid heavy spending on player transfers and coaching changes. The licenses had been issued by the municipality of Nancagua through its then transit director and later mayor, Aníbal Valenzuela, who allegedly received official Colo-Colo merchandise and other benefits in exchange, conduct that prosecutors characterized in their charges against him as bribery. Through the scheme, Mosa and the players obtained authentic licenses without completing the required medical, psychometric, and practical examinations.

Prosecutors regarded Mosa's position as more serious than that of the other defendants, as he had also listed a false address in Nancagua and presented a falsified primary-school completion certificate to obtain his license. While prosecutors reached agreements with several of the players involved, approved by the Santa Cruz Juzgado de Garantía (court of guarantee), Mosa was placed under a cautionary measure requiring monthly reporting to authorities pending discussion of a possible alternative resolution.

Mall Paseo Chiloé In 2008, Mosa and his older brother, Jackob Mosa, as owners of the holding company Grupo Pasmar S.A., undertook a controversial shopping-center development, the Mall Paseo Chiloé, in the city of Castro on Chiloé Island. The project drew criticism both for the scale of the building and its location within the city's historic center, near a church designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, which characterized the project's impact as negative. The mall was also able to proceed after a change to Castro's zoning plan was made the same year the project was proposed, a change without which it would not have received a building permit; Grupo Pasmar S.A. was separately fined by the Castro local police court for violating a work-stoppage order.

Political views Mosa is openly progressivist and identifies with Chile's political left. His parents were members of the Baath Arab Socialist Party before the family left Syria.