Amer Group

"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."

"My attempts to parachute into a special situation in listed equities were not always welcomed. In the UK, I tried to take Cable & Wireless private, meeting a couple of times with its then chairman, Richard Lapthorne, who listened to my idea to break the group in two, told me the company wasn’t interested and then proceeded to do pretty much what I had suggested. Some deals also went spectacularly wrong. One was a former Finnish co-operative, Amer Group, which owns some of the world’s largest sports brands and equipment-makers, including Wilson, Salomon and others. It had a large private golf club in Helsinki and a big chalet in Courchevel, which to us looked like corporate excess. The idea was to sell off the Wilson and Salomon brands, but we faced opposition from the board and, as happened with Elisa, we ran out of time when the markets crashed and we had to retreat from aggressive positions, focusing instead on fire-fighting in our bigger investments. I wanted to merge Amer into something bigger, and Novator, the investment company I had set up in 2004, had a meeting with the chief executive, Roger Talermo, and his Finnish institutional shareholders. I could see so much potential to shake up the company. There were 83 staff in the Helsinki headquarters, which could easily have been run by five because there were no operations in Finland. Salomon was run from France, Wilson from Chicago and other operations from Seattle. I wanted to fire Talermo and call a shareholder vote. We couldn’t convince the other shareholders, but shortly after we exited – I had lost about €60 million on my investment – it was announced that Talermo was leaving the company."