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.”