Bravo brewery

"We designed the Bravo brewery in a modular way that allowed us to quickly scale up production. I took advice from brewery experts in Denmark who told me that the typical mistake people make in designing breweries is that they do not allow themselves room to grow. So we started at a capacity of 1 million hectolitres, with a three-stage plan to take it to 2.5 million hectolitres and then 4.5 million hectolitres."

"What was it like to add $2 billion to my personal wealth in the space of just two years? It certainly wasn’t ‘easy come, easy go’, although that is how it might look now, but it was definitely rapid. I made my first $100 million in 2002, from the Bravo brewery sale to Heineken. In those years Pharmaco, later Actavis, a generic pharmaceutical business where I was the largest shareholder, had become a public company with a stock market capitalisation of about $50 million – so small that London investment bankers would barely give me the time of day. But Actavis grew phenomenally both organically and through mergers and acquisitions, and by 2008 it was valued at €5.3 billion ($7.3 billion dollars at the exchange rate of the time) and was Iceland’s biggest industrial company, second in size only to the banks on the nation’s stock exchange. Actavis, in all its guises, was my biggest, most profitable and most complicated investment. It sums up the way I like to do business. In its early days, it involved putting together an equity consortium in a privatisation in eastern Europe. Then there was a reverse takeover of a listed company, the spin-off of its core business, a hostile cross-border takeover of another listed company, a public-to-private leveraged buy-out, financial restructuring and finally a sale to a listed company."