"I am leaving and I won't return until I am the richest man in the world," the financier Joan March Ordinas said to the grandfather of Miquel Monjo Estelrich in 1916, when the magnate abandoned Santa Margalida, the town where he was born. The great grandmother of Miquel Monjo, Rosa March Ordinas, was the famous multimillionaire's only sister.
Her son, the grandfather of Monjo, always had a very good relationship with his uncle Joan March. So much so, that 34 years after he left home, the magnate sold the house he had lived in, for a notional price. In that way the house, a real millionaire's house, became the property of Miquel Monjo and his three brothers. The famous financier lived there from his wedding in 1905 until 1916.
This grand three storey house is located in the main square of Santa Margalida (a municipality of 3,348 inhabitants, in the north east of Mallorca). It still contains much of the furniture used by Joan March such as a bookcase with his initials carved in the wood (JM), and the first bank desk that he used prior to the foundation of Banca March in 1926.
At the beginning of September 2001, Miquel Monjo was the main character in a strange event. While he sorted things in the attic of the family house, where currently only his mother lives, he found a box with an inscription "1895." When he opened it, he saw that it contained the books of accounting of the March Brothers company, owned by the father and uncle of Joan March.
His surprise was so great that Monjo needed a few days for it to sink in. For several nights Monjo read the pages of the books that recorded the accounts of the company from 1895 to 1905.
"I didn't expect to find these books" explained Monjo, "because when I was small, I asked my grandfather where the books of March Brothers were, and he told me that they had all been burned in 1932, when Joan March was imprisoned, in order to prevent the Republicans finding them".
42 year old Miquel Monjo is proprietor of a Management Advice Centre so is used to handling books of accounts.
Now the historians have examined the books and have confirmed that they were in the writing of Joan March, Monjo is debating where these documents should reside. At present the University of the Balearics (UIB) have formally requested that they are housed on the University Campus so that researchers can easily access them, but there are other possibilities such as the creation of a museum as a permanent tribute to the financial magnate.