Herakles

"Thereafter, I arranged a meeting with Bo, and it was a straightforward conversation in his fine office on Arsenalsgatan in Stockholm. I said that I intended to buy the A-shares if Bo and I agreed on the future. My proposal was that a new company would take the name Skrinet and include his preferred interests. Bo would buy the voting-strong A-shares in the new Skrinet. Together, we would place the B-shares on the market so he could introduce the company to the stock exchange. The old Skrinet, "my Skrinet," would change its name and focus on larger companies. The name became Herakles for a period. It was crucial that Bo Sandell supported this solution."

"My analyses of the prospective companies gave me a wish list. We wanted an ownership position in the rubber company Trelleborg for its stable operations, and therefore good dividends, to live on, furthermore the undervalued Boliden and Ahlsell to turn them around, and the majority of the security company Securitas for future long-term development. It would also be good to have an option on the skilled textile company Almedahl-Dalsjöfors. We also wanted a debenture to manage the financing. We would release all shares in Herakles, which essentially then became a cash reserve, or as Robert Weil's partner and CEO of Proventus, Gabriel Urwitz, put it: a financial muscle. We would not argue with each other going forward."

"It was impossible to understand what Robert Weil actually wanted, and we two had therefore never been able to untie the knots together. But eventually, I felt that I could talk fairly well with him despite remarkably vile external circumstances. He had managed to borrow 600 million SEK to try to make a so-called corner in Herakles, but against a guy who couldn't afford to buy him out, namely me. Somehow, it was as if I was "the deal.""

"Early one morning, a friend called and asked if I had read DN. "No, not yet." "You absolutely shouldn't do it," was the reply. He wouldn't relent until I promised not to, at least not until later in the afternoon. It was good advice. You have to handle problems in the right order, and nothing could be done about Sven-Ivan's article. There were serious accusations against the way I acted in the construction of Herakles. The unusual approach in Sweden of disfiguring my face with paragraph signs gave me associations to Julius Streicher's Nazi publication Der Stürmer, and fortunately, I haven't seen this approach copied elsewhere other than in DN."