A pile of cheap permits doesn’t look like much on a balance sheet. The Spanish ride-hailing bet made by Alejandro Betancourt López shows what those permits became once the market moved.

Taxi holders had offloaded VTC licences at low prices, seeing them as a credential with no waiting buyer. Cheap in, scarce out. That was the shape of it. Auro Travel was assembled permit by permit, without much notice, and grew into one of the largest private-hire operators in Spain.

The Bid

By late 2022, the supply picture had flipped. Uber and Cabify both needed to scale in Spain, and the permit supply was fixed. Two names. One asset. A large share of it sat with Betancourt López.

A November 2022 acquisition bid from the two companies valued Auro New Transport at roughly €200 million. The bid was set at a level no taxi holder would have imagined a few years earlier. Credentials once dismissed were now the scarce thing two global platforms were competing to buy, and pay a premium to secure.

What Came After

The story didn’t stop at the bid. Uber followed in 2025 by investing €220 million into its Spanish operations, deepening its position in one of Europe’s most tightly regulated ride-hailing markets. By then the Spanish market was worth far more to Uber than a set of cheap credentials ever suggested.

Set against the pennies the permits first cost, the arithmetic is stark. Supply was capped. Demand kept rising. The licensing friction that discouraged most outside capital had created the very scarcity that generated the return. A government ceiling, set right as demand began to accelerate, meant the asset had one direction to travel, and Alejandro Betancourt López had been holding it since before the climb began.