BTC

"It peaked when I bought a Bulgarian telecoms group, BTC. My leverage on that deal was 95 per cent, meaning I only had to put up 5 per cent of the funds myself. I was hooked."

"Almost by accident in 2003, shortly after I moved to London, I received a call from Advent International, a private equity group. ‘Thor,’ they said. ‘We know you from the brewery financing talks in Russia. We’ve watched what you did there and are kicking ourselves for not having invested but here’s another opportunity. We’re bidding on a privatisation of the major Bulgarian telecoms company BTC. We remember you were in a privatisation in the…"

"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."

"I thrived on coping with the esoteric, the dangerous and the exotic in pursuit of a deal. From pharmaceuticals investments in Bulgaria at the time NATO was bombing Serbia to dismantling a top-heavy former nationalised telecoms giant in the Czech Republic, I discovered that a little capital and a lot of debt could multiply my initial wealth many times over. It peaked when I bought a Bulgarian telecoms group, BTC. My leverage on that deal was 95 per cent, meaning I only had to put up 5 per cent of the funds myself. I was hooked."

"In the meantime, I had become involved in other privatisations. Almost by accident in 2003, shortly after I moved to London, I received a call from Advent International, a private equity group. ‘Thor,’ they said. ‘We know you from the brewery financing talks in Russia. We’ve watched what you did there and are kicking ourselves for not having invested but here’s another opportunity. We’re bidding on a privatisation of the major Bulgarian telecoms company BTC. We remember you were in a privatisation in the pharmaceutical industry in 1999 in Bulgaria. We’ve got another investment. Would you like to co-invest with us?’"

"In Bulgaria, it was a different story. Jobs needed to be cut, as the company was a mulish giant, unable to take the next step towards the future. But BTC survived, which it wouldn’t have done otherwise, and it was a catalyst in modernising the telecoms infrastructure in Bulgaria, installing fibre-optic cables throughout cities and creating a basis for other companies to thrive. The internet revolution took place in Bulgaria, to the benefit of all, even though jobs at this one particular company were fewer than before."