Gut Instinct As Greenlight

"In the boom years, along with countless others, I worshipped the god of leverage. In my best year, I made $1.3 billion from merging, floating and spinning off businesses. Then I looked to do it all again. I was always happiest when deals, ideally more than one at a time, were in view. I liked to call what I did visionary and similar in some ways to chess, in that I was always planning the game several moves ahead. I like to think I am good at spotting opportunities and having a sense of how things could turn. If asked about my strengths I’m intuitive – my best results have come when I have followed my intuition, whereas the times I have managed to suppress it have usually ended in disaster. I’m always looking at my portfolio and seeing how I can develop and enhance it, and my time horizon is generally where I want to be in two to five years."

"I should have walked away once I had figured out what was going on. I should have said: ‘I smell a rat and this is dangerous.’ That was what my intuition was telling me, but I ignored it because I thought I would be portrayed as a failure or a bad loser if I claimed that the deal was rigged. Instead, I wrote letters to the prime minister, the economics minister and the privatisation committee and did media interviews in which I said that the privatisation process for both banks was opaque and unclear. I told them that even Bulgaria’s privatisation rules were more transparent than Iceland’s. But my comments were ignored. Later, there was a parliamentary inquiry, which basically brushed over everything. After the crash, it became clear that what I had been saying had been justified."

"I have always been interested in what I call special situations. I like to parachute into hairy situations, save them from getting worse, turn them around and make an exit. You could call it storm-riding financial markets. Such situations develop only when people are scared and do not understand the risks. I act like one of the advance guards who seeks to establish an entrenched advantage. I am not a mercenary. I am accountable. My personal reputation and wealth are at stake and my next deal depends on how I have entered and exited my last one. Publicly quoted corporations are normally not nimble or brave enough to put their balance sheets at risk in the same way that risk-taking individuals do. I can put myself on the line for what I am doing. People know who I am and what they see is what they get."