Allianz

"There are deals that I did in the past that I wouldn’t do now. I wouldn’t attempt to do the deal we tried with Amer Group and I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near that dreadful Allianz investment. I would still do most of the successful deals, however, particularly the Czech Republic and Bulgarian telecoms deals. I would also still do the Actavis leveraged buy-out. The reason I made money is that other people did not get the risk assessments right – they overemphasised some risks and misunderstood the opportunities of others."

"Above all, however, trillions and quadrillions are flowing into the real estate business worldwide – which is now considered a safe bank. The reckless lending by banks to home buyers, the subsequent packaging of these loans, and their resale to other investors, which triggered the financial crisis of 2008/09, are being forgotten. Everyone trusts in concrete. New, actually well-intended investment regulations by regulatory authorities for insurers like Allianz even lead them to turn more towards the real estate business."

"One of my major mistakes was that I was in too much of a hurry to try other ventures and didn’t pay enough attention to Iceland’s problems. I was trying to lay as many bets as I could while the plentiful supply of surplus capital lasted. But I had lost focus and was involved in too many things. I sold Bulgarian telecoms group BTC but then, before I had finished a project with Finnish telecoms firm Elisa, I was engrossed in the Actavis leveraged buy-out. Before completing my ill-fated investment in Amer Sports, I made a derivative bet on Allianz, with an even worse outcome. And I also negotiated a complex deal to come to the rescue of the beleaguered Polish owners of QXL, an early online auction competitor to eBay that had run into trouble. The company then recovered, with its shares rising a staggering 1,260 per cent in 2005, making it the year’s best performing stock on the London Stock Exchange. We then sold it to Naspers, a subsidiary of a South African media group. The problem was that I couldn’t handle the pitch or the speed because there were so many things going on. My focus was always on doing the next deal, restructuring and rejigging something I already had, and not so much on the oversight, which is an important check and balance. I was not good at that. I’m always more interested in creating something new. I had lost my ability to focus, something that had served me so well in Russia, and which is essential for an investor looking after his money."

"My mindset during the storm-riding years had always been: ‘I’ve got clever people around me, so keep going. If the plan isn’t good enough, my people and the banks will stop me. My mission is to champion the plan. If it gets shot down, so be it. If it is good enough, it will happen and probably succeed.’ This had worked in the past, but with the Allianz deal, for example, people in my organisation started to accuse me of railroading things through."

"Just after I sold BTC, I bought close to 5 per cent of German insurance giant Allianz, which proved to be a disastrous mistake. I had started pursuing an activist strategy in Finland, taking relatively small investments in companies and lobbying for change to unlock value for shareholders. Now I wanted to try it on a grander scale and break up Allianz into its banking and insurance arms, but I found it impossible to rally support for a perceived attack on ‘fortress Germany’. I learned through these two deals that politics often overrides good business ideas. This was a prime example showing that the agency theory I had learned in school did indeed have a lot of truth in it. People often have very different interests in the same assets. We ended up losing about €350 million in a super-leveraged structure."