Elisa

"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 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."

"When I was on the cover of *Forbes* magazine in 2005 Bulgaria’s media lapped it up. ‘Our Thor is On The List,’ ran the headlines. Their Thor? They had nobody of their own on the list, so they adopted me. I was an honorary Bulgarian. I was an outsider, but when it was positive news I was theirs. It felt good to be cherished. I felt that my time had come. However, high on the success of my pharma investments, I decided to copy the model in telecoms and try to repeat the Pharmaco story. I had bought a huge cash cow in the form of Bulgaria’s state telecom company, although it needed massive modernisation which we committed to by introducing fibre and mobile phone service. Now all I needed to do was reverse that company into a Scandinavian listed company with access to listed capital markets and use them to buy more telecom companies in the region (the East-to-West arbitrage). I wanted to do a copy-and-paste of what I had already done in Iceland, and I got the chance to try it in Finland. I managed to acquire the biggest single shareholding of the listed Finnish telecom Elisa, a conservative company more than 100 years old and the only Scandinavian telecom operator with no international assets. This was a no-brainer to me, and I thought the investors would welcome someone with a new vision of modernising their company and fully using its potential for scale with merger ideas and ready-made connections in eastern Europe. But that’s when I hit a wall."