Iceland

"I’ve decided I never want to retire. I’m in this for life and completely focused on Iceland, apart from owning or having stakes in a hairdressing salon, a vodka distillery in Iceland (the country), property businesses in Poland and the UK, a film production company, an ice-making business, a media monitoring agency, an African biofuels company, a chain of restaurants and an upmarket fish and chip shop. That diversification bug that plagued us through our early years has certainly proved hard to shake off!"

"Tarsem and I finally signed a deal with Palmi on 24 November 2004 in the London flat of Arev’s John Scheving (like all the Icelanders we met, he had a swish flat in Chelsea overlooking Stamford Bridge). We would buy the Iceland business for a fixed £ 160 million. Best of all we negotiated to leave the pension deficit behind with Booker. We agreed to pay a further £ 20 million, phased over our first year in the business, to take us out of the BFG pension scheme altogether and make a fresh start. This was without doubt the best £ 20 million we have ever spent. We also managed to negotiate a shareholders’ agreement whereby no dividend could be paid or any refinancing take place without the consent of the management. We were frightened that Baugur might want to strip cash out of the business. Why they agreed to it I don’t know but they were pretty broad-brush in their approach and once the deal was agreed in principle they weren’t too interested in the detail, particularly where Iceland was concerned: they were focused on the big opportunities in the property portfolio and Booker. We also negotiated that if they ever wanted to sell the company we had the right to buy provided we could match the price. These conditions later proved to be worth their weight in gold."

"I’ve decided I never want to retire. I’m in this for life and completely focused on Iceland, apart from owning or having stakes in a hairdressing salon, a vodka distillery in Iceland (the country), property businesses in Poland and the UK, a film production company, an ice-making business, a media monitoring agency, an African biofuels company, a chain of restaurants and an upmarket fish and chip shop. That diversification bug that plagued us through our early years has certainly proved hard to shake off!"

"Tarsem and I finally signed a deal with Palmi on 24 November 2004 in the London flat of Arev’s John Scheving (like all the Icelanders we met, he had a swish flat in Chelsea overlooking Stamford Bridge). We would buy the Iceland business for a fixed £160 million. Best of all we negotiated to leave the pension deficit behind with Booker. We agreed to pay a further £20 million, phased over our first year in the business, to take us out of the BFG pension scheme altogether and make a fresh start. This was without doubt the best £20 million we have ever spent. We also managed to negotiate a shareholders’ agreement whereby no dividend could be paid or any refinancing take place without the consent of the management. We were frightened that Baugur might want to strip cash out of the business. Why they agreed to it I don’t know but they were pretty broad-brush in their approach and once the deal was agreed in principle they weren’t too interested in the detail, particularly where Iceland was concerned: they were focused on the big opportunities in the property portfolio and Booker. We also negotiated that if they ever wanted to sell the company we had the right to buy provided we could match the price. These conditions later proved to be worth their weight in gold."

"what lessons can be learned from the crash? The first, I guess, is to look out for history repeating itself. In 2003 in Iceland, for example, I could see clear parallels with the leveraged boom in Russia of a decade earlier, although my vantage point had changed markedly."

"Now we had a listing in Iceland but nearly all our business was in central Europe. We had a lot of cash and started looking for an…"

"In a talk in Reykjavik in October 2011, the chief economist at Citigroup, Willem H. Buiter, likened the talent pool in Iceland to that which could be found in a mid-sized city such as Coventry in England. The nation couldn’t therefore logically expect to provide good people for the Treasury, the Central Bank, the FSA, the courts, the parliament, the Foreign Office or the business sector. Buiter told his stunned audience that he had never witnessed such collective stupidity in any developed country as was so dominant in Iceland during the last fifteen years before the crash of 2008. Strong words indeed, but he had a good point."

"Play is itself quite a story. I founded it in 2005 at a time when in my opinion the Polish telecoms market was badly run, being dominated by big European companies, each of which was having to deal with tussles between its shareholders. Vodafone had a dispute with its Polish partner that ended with its Polish operation being bought by Polkomtel; France’s Vivendi and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile were fighting over their asset in Poland; and France Telecom’s Orange was having a problem with its local partner. We saw an opportunity for a fourth player to start afresh and try to capture market share, so we sneaked into the market by buying telecoms licences. We didn’t bother with 2G and decided to bid only for 3G licences. It was unheard of for a private equity company to buy licences without any experience in building the infrastructure. But we found Netia, a small fixed-line independent, to help us as a local player in the Polish market. We ended up outbidding 3, the mobile phone provider backed by Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa. The key to making this work was getting funding, which we did principally from China Development Bank. We had spotted in our privatisation and tender processes for upgrading Bulgaria’s telecoms that the Chinese government has a long-term strategic plan to become a major player in telecoms infrastructure. We saw that the best kit was coming from Chinese subcontractors, so we went straight to them and found that they had big plans. We had big plans too and suggested that we work together, building a new mobile telecommunications infrastructure in eastern Europe’s biggest country, with a population of 40 million. The Chinese like to take a long-term view, so we signed a letter of intent in China at the same time as we were bidding for licences. I used the occasion of an official state visit from Iceland to China to get the deal rubber-stamped, and so in the Palace of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square there was an official signing ceremony as the climax of the state visit. We signed a letter of intent to buy all the equipment from Huawei, which has since emerged from the shadows as a dominant player in global telecoms, and it lobbied China Development Bank to make its first ever major loan in Europe. In total, this loan amounted to more than $1 billion. I have a great picture of the deal being signed by us and Huawei with the presidents of Iceland and China standing behind. It was an occasion that I am sure went a long way towards getting China Development Bank’s support and resulted in Huawei sending an army of Chinese engineers to Poland, where they helped us set up the towers, transmission and other infrastructure from scratch. We entered Poland as outsiders and targeted the youth market. It was tough going for the first two years but our patience paid off, and after about four years we broke even. Today, Play is profitable and growing significantly. It now has more than 11 million customers and a 20 per cent market share…"

"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."

"In hindsight, I should have never put so much money at risk in Iceland. So why did I do so? Part of it was my ego and need for recognition in an Icelandic comeback, but it was also laziness. It was just easier for me to operate in Iceland and I reckoned that, having built a strong financial base there, I could make my name in London and the international markets."

"Let’s do the math, as Americans say. In 2005, Forbes calculated I was worth $1.4 billion, making me Iceland’s first billionaire. By the peak of the boom, midway through 2007, this had increased to $4 billion, with roughly one-third of my wealth in Actavis, another third in Landsbanki, Iceland’s second-biggest bank which was privatised in 2002, and the remainder in other ventures. But by the end of 2009, following the government’s seizure of Landsbanki and the fall in Actavis’s valuation, this had fallen to about $40 million. So if people asked how I was doing, I replied that I still had 1 per cent of my net worth."

"Once he had become wealthy from fishing, Thor started preparing for the founding of Eimskip, a publicly traded Icelandic shipping company, which was to operate between Iceland and neighbouring trading partners, particularly Scotland and Denmark. He hosted the preparatory meetings at his home and was the biggest individual shareholder, and he probably thought he would be chairman of the board. But when push came to shove, his colleagues did not think it proper for a Dane to be chairman of a company that had become emblematic of Iceland’s renaissance and was referred to as the nation’s ‘dream child’ during its initial stock offering. He was appalled and never had anything to do with the running of Eimskip again."

"After getting his fingers burnt so badly, Thor came to the conclusion that the only way for Icelanders to create any real wealth was in the fishing industry. In pursuance of that belief, he went on to become the leading figure in building up the fishing trade in Iceland after centuries in which the focus had been on farming. It took him and his associates only two decades to transform both Iceland’s economy and its society. Living standards rose significantly and a more accomplished and robust culture was established."

"I felt that Iceland was a dangerous place – picture-perfect on the surface but with cronyism driving the currents just beneath the surface. To me, Iceland was all about conformity and I didn’t want to join in – better to be a tiddler in a large pool than a big fish in a small one."

"They would ship to Russia bottling equipment formerly owned by Pharmaco, a listed Icelandic pharmaceutical company, and make soft drinks for sale locally. The two old friends would eventually fall out spectacularly over this venture."

"I also felt under enormous pressure to help my father. He had sold the original machinery to the joint venture on delayed payment terms, making promises to various people that everything would work out. ‘I am counting on you, son,’ he told me. ‘We can’t let this fail.’ How was I supposed to react? I could not let my father down or everything would blow up for him in Iceland, where he was…"

"Deutsche Bank had been in the investment for 18 months and made a fivefold return. Pharmaco staged a road show for Icelandic investors and pension funds, taking about 30 of them to see the assets in Bulgaria. They were as happy as calves let out to pasture in the spring. No one in Iceland had done anything like this before.…"

"So why revisit the misery of the collapse of all three of Iceland’s major commercial banks, brought to their knees by difficulties in financing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the UK? With the nation’s consequential pain all too tangible, why look back when I want only to study the road ahead? And why get involved in Icelandic controversies again when I have already learned – from the one interview I gave in 2008 – that telling my side of the story only invites more questions and heavier criticism?"

"Another reason I didn’t walk away was that I knew I would be criticised for such an action in Iceland and did not want to deal with the consequences of that. I feared the criticism that would ensue and the rumours that would be spread which would hurt me, not only in Iceland but abroad. People would say that we didn’t really have the money, that the sale of Bravo to Heineken hadn’t been the great deal it truly was, and so on. But my father was confident that it would all end well. I said to him: ‘Why are you so confident? I have a very bad feeling about this.’ But he just replied, in the most typical Icelandic way: ‘*Thetta reddast*,’ meaning that it would all work out fine somehow in the end. It did not help that the media were concentrating on the personalities rather than the privatisation. The story became about my father redeeming himself by becoming Landsbanki chairman and a major shareholder. It was a great story about a once-famous Icelandic family making a grand return, but the attention that we received made me uneasy. On the day the deal was completed I was weary and apprehensive. ‘Be careful with all the publicity,’ I said to my father. ‘Good publicity is often followed by bad. Something could go spectacularly wrong and this is a small society. People patting you on the back now will be the same ones who spit at your back later.’"

"I was attracted by transitional economies, primarily in emerging Europe and Iceland, that had four characteristics in common: high growth, great margins, limited competition and few international investors or lenders."

"I should have walked away once I had figured out what was going on. I should have said: ‘I smell a rat and this is dangerous.’ That was what my intuition was telling me, but I ignored it because I thought I would be portrayed as a failure or a bad loser if I claimed that the deal was rigged. Instead, I wrote letters to the prime minister, the economics minister and the privatisation committee and did media interviews in which I said that the privatisation process for both banks was opaque and unclear. I told them that even Bulgaria’s privatisation rules were more transparent than Iceland’s. But my comments were ignored. Later, there was a parliamentary inquiry, which basically brushed over everything. After the crash, it became clear that what I had been saying had been justified."

"Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland’s banking collapse is the largest suffered by any country in economic history. At the end of the second quarter of 2008, Iceland’s external debt was €50 billion; its GDP in 2007 was just €8.5 billion. Clearly the government had borrowed far too much on the international markets. The krona fell precipitously in value, foreign currency transactions were heavily restricted for many years afterwards, and the market capitalisation of the Iceland Stock Exchange tumbled by more than 90 per cent. The full financial cost of the crisis is at least three quarters of the nation’s entire GDP at the time, and the economic costs were felt for years, as Iceland struggled with recession and austerity measures relating to the deficit in the immediate period after the crash."

"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."

"So what do I do about the knives in the back? Do I just ignore them? Can I extract them? A wiser person would say don’t get yourself in a position where people can take a shot at you. Don’t get in harm’s way. But the only way to ensure that you’ll never be hit by a car is never to cross a road. That’s not an option, so you have to find a balance, but you can avoid much of the flak by simply not being there. You can’t avoid the knives in the back but you can make it further for people to throw them. London was a shelter for me. That’s what saved me when I was vilified. My father didn’t bear the brunt of the criticism; that was reserved for me. But he was living in Iceland and I wasn’t. He told me a story about one of the low points in the aftermath of the crash that illustrated what he was dealing with. He was out walking his dog on a sunny day and as he approached a man with his two small daughters on their bikes they stopped and the father said: ‘You see that man, he’s one of the men who have destroyed our country.’ He spat at my father’s feet and continued on his way. That was the sort of thing he had to deal with. I’ve not been into bars in Iceland much since the crash. I was on my guard for the first few years and still am. It’s hard to break the habit once you have been publicly vilified. Sometimes I still have a sense of unease, but it’s mostly confusion and old habits. The level of online abuse and prejudice in the years after the crash is hard to ignore. However, things in Iceland have moved on so much that two generations of Icelanders do not really remember this time at all. It seems like a different country and I feel perfectly at home and at ease there. Iceland is a country of extremes where people are either loved or hated. I don’t want to be loved or hated. I just want people to be indifferent."

"After the collapse of Northern Rock in August 2007 and subsequent concerns about other UK-based banks, what I had seen as a secure deposit base and a strength began to weaken. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year later, UK investors began a general run on bank deposits which was to pose jurisdictional questions in previously uncharted waters. Icesave became a problem because its UK deposits were held by a UK branch of Landsbanki, rather than by Heritable, which was a British bank wholly owned by Landsbanki. In hindsight, this was a major mistake by the management. I have to admit that, right up to the weekend of the collapse, I was unaware of such technicalities. It only started to dawn on me that this could be a difficulty when I spoke to the prime minister on 2 October. I can see it clearly now. Iceland is not a member of the EU, but an Icelandic bank had opened a branch in the UK, under EU regulation, and accepted deposits. So there was a jurisdictional issue – an issue that came to the fore over the weekend of 4–5 October 2008, as Iceland’s financial crisis unfolded."

"The main strand of the claim that made up this issue was that an enormous sum invested by UK and Dutch savers would now have to be paid back by the Icelandic taxpayer. It was an incendiary idea, which, by virtue of being repeated, became an accepted truth. In fact, for the Icelandic taxpayer to have to foot the bill, Landsbanki’s assets would have had to have been worthless or to have fallen at least 50 per cent. Neither was ever the case. Landsbanki did not go bankrupt because it had lost its assets. It had simply not been able to change Icelandic krona for foreign currency. It was a liquidity crisis, rather than any fraud or malfeasance, that forced it to stop. Furthermore, no one had previously suggested that the Icelandic state was responsible for debts of a commercial enterprise, so it was extraordinary to do so now. The problem was some ambiguity over the responsibilities in such situations of EFTA countries (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) vis-à-vis EU member states."

"So what lessons can be learned from the crash? The first, I guess, is to look out for history repeating itself. In 2003 in Iceland, for example, I could see clear parallels with the leveraged boom in Russia of a decade earlier, although my vantage point had changed markedly. Instead of being young, poor and mustard-keen in a freezing Khrushchevera apartment block, I had made my first fortune, was living and travelling first class and had an office in Park Lane. Still, I could not resist grabbing another piece of the action. Five years later, I experienced a familiar feeling. Iceland’s boom was not going to last any longer than Russia’s had but, while the merry-go-round kept turning, it was tempting to stay on for the ride. ‘When there’s so much money available, you should take it while it lasts,’ was the prevailing sentiment at the time. It was another land-grab situation."

"So why didn’t I get off the carousel before it crashed? It is easy to ask that now, of course, but it is like being at a party that you know has been going on for far too long. You’re not the drunkest person there and you’re certainly not the instigator, but it is difficult in the middle of the party to be the lone voice saying: ‘Hang on; hang on. Let’s lower the music, tone it down; have a glass of water.’ That is not what happens and it was a bit like that. I got carried away in Iceland. My intuition told me that what was going on there was not sound. But the country was awash with business ideas and loans to fund them, and it was too easy to say ‘yes’. Now it is clear that I was in a fool’s paradise and I was the biggest fool. I had a ticket to go somewhere else but I didn’t use it."

"As for me, I had invested my own capital in Landsbanki and had only myself to blame for my own losses, but being held responsible for the collapse of an entire economy was something I found hard to swallow. It was the worst of times for me – and really quite frightening. Icesave and Landsbanki were toxic, and anyone connected with them, from employees to advisers, was almost a social pariah. I was beset by depression over it all. In the media I was asked if I was going to pick up the bill myself, and it was suggested that it was ‘prudent for me not be out and about in Iceland these days’. I was as afraid and angry as anyone there, but nobody was interested in listening when I came out publicly and said that I was certain that Landsbanki’s estate would totally cover its Icesave exposure and that it would never be a cost to anyone outside. I was desperate to get the position clarified, but the confusion seemed to drag on for ever. To many Icelanders, I was instrumental in bringing about Iceland’s sorry state; I was a troublemaker who had no right to be heard."

"I took to that market like a fish to water. I had some experience of the tech sector through my gaming portfolio companies. One such business was CCP, an interesting company founded in Iceland by a team of developers and gaming enthusiasts with investments from an Icelandic pension fund. These two very different groups did not see eye to eye at all, so the founders approached me to buy out the institutional investor. They presumed someone like me who had founded and built several businesses would speak their language and be a better fit to expand the company. The founders and management had massive ambitions that I took with a pinch of salt, but there was an incredibly loyal fanbase of customers who paid a monthly subscription fee. The company’s stated goal was to create another world outside the real one: to their users, the creation was more important than the actual world! They called it the ‘Metaverse’ and they were actually the first real players there, years before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called it out as the next level of social networks and renamed his company Meta. CCP’s EVE Online game was and is a space-based sandbox ‘massively multiplayer online’ (MMO) game known for its player-driven economy, vast universe and complex gameplay mechanics. It allows players to explore, trade, engage in player-versus-player combat, and participate in large-scale battles and political events within the game’s persistent universe. I saw CCP grow from one office in Iceland to large offices in the US, Shanghai, the UK and elsewhere. As most of EVE’s players were inside that sandbox world for hours each day, it really felt that it was becoming the most important place for many of them. The annual EVE Fanfest attracted thousands of people from all over the world, and often people from different countries who had met inside the game would get married there in reality. It was astounding to watch this community as it grew, and I really felt that if this was a guide to the future, then technology was changing the social fabric in more fundamental ways than most people realised."

"Iceland has gone some way to being rehabilitated in the global economy, aided hugely by a resurgent tourist economy. I recall Bill Clinton telling me in May 2014 how impressed he was with Iceland and how the country was a shining example of how to beat a crisis. It’s a common misconception that Iceland is a miracle story of sorts. But the fact is that the ‘miracle’ is questionable, to say the least. The miracle is basically due to the fact that Iceland is so small in the global financial system. The country got away with ringfencing domestic interests from foreign creditors in a defensive move and then strong-arming them through very punitive capital controls over a lengthy negotiation period. Iceland was small enough to go bust and play hardball internationally in the aftermath without any serious long-term consequnces. It would be hard to see other bigger nations pull something like this off in a similiar situation."

"What in fact happened was a typical macroeconomic event in the form of Covid-19. The financial and economic effects for business were artificially prolonged by the zero per cent interest ‘rescue policies’ of the US and European central banks. I learned from my experience in Iceland, when I had waited too long for the tide to turn, to cut my losses and not leave any loose ends. So in Latin America I decided to make a clean break to fully focus on new markets and opportunities without any distractions from previous operations."

"In the boom days, I was not some sort of ideologue or business guru with strict rules governing what I was doing. My business strategy in terms of all the leverage I was taking and the deals I was doing was not a model I set out with. I went to Russia, saw the opportunity and figured out the easiest way of capturing it, which happened to be leveraged deals. Then I went back to Iceland, saw that banks there and in London were throwing cash at me and wanted to find a way to put the maximum amount of cash to work, so I looked for larger deals with opportunities for higher levels of gearing. Now my world and the financial world in general have changed and this modus operandi has evolved, mostly moving to unlisted companies and technology-focused venture capital. A lot of banks, for example, still have a lot of bombed-out assets which now present opportunities. Also, as a result of the crazy zero-interest-rate environment engendered and perpetuated by Covid-19, many businesses cannot operate in a real interest-rate environment, let alone one coupled with significant inflation. I will therefore try to partner up and use the capital that’s already in the system to try to revive some of these businesses. This is where the opportunities will be for my financial storm-riding in the future. We are in the midst of a major market correction, which is painful to many of my portfolio companies. I will have to try to dodge bullets again – but it will also throw up special situations, which I always find to be the best source of truly unique investment opportunities."

"In Russia I was just a marginal character outside the system, whereas at the time of the crash in Iceland I was close to the centre. I had the biggest balance sheet and the biggest exposure to the economy, but I did not realise how weak the state was. I was also fooled by the ratings. An Icelandic economist has pointed out, and rightfully so, that the Icelandic banks are the only financial institutions in the world that have gone bankrupt with an A rating. With Russia, I was always aware of the fragile state of the economy. My assumption was that it could blow up tomorrow and everything would be gone."

"Another similarity is the oligarchies that had emerged in pre-crash Russia and in Iceland. I would estimate that in 2008 about 30 people controlled Iceland’s economy, out of a total population of 300,000. That is one in 10,000: not an excessive concentration of power compared with, say, the US or the UK, but the extent of what Iceland’s political and financial oligarchs controlled was, as with their counterparts in Russia, disproportionate, which in such a small country created a huge imbalance."

"What happened is that money got diverted out of the economy into the capital markets. It is like when people stop buying houses and cars and instead mortgage their apartments and start speculating in the equity and government bond markets. Companies can do that too. Directors say to each other: ‘Let’s not focus so much on fishing or making more food here. Let’s just buy this debt.’ This is one similarity between what happened in Russia and Iceland before their respective crashes. In Iceland, the situation was stoked up by an unrealistically strong krona and the state issuing paper. Of course, the banks had their problems too, but the biggest problem was the unsustainable strength of the currency. That is what caused the most collateral damage when the bubble was finally pricked."

"I do not mean to paint me white and them black; I am just looking at it from a different perspective. My actions were not dictated by any great altruism; I simply thought Iceland would weather the financial storm and we would get to the other side. Most of the other guys just said: ‘There’s not a chance in hell.’ But they were pessimists, something I can never be accused of being. Innate optimism is at the heart of everything I have ever done. I believe that to succeed you have to be an optimist and then you build everything from that. In the years after the 2008 crash, the biggest danger was that I would lose my optimism. I came close to doing so but thank God it didn’t happen."

"After getting his fingers burnt so badly, Thor came to the conclusion that the only way for Icelanders to create any real wealth was in the fishing industry. In pursuance of that belief, he went on to become the leading figure in building up the fishing trade in Iceland after centuries in which the focus had been on farming. It took him and his associates only two decades to transform both Iceland’s economy and its society. Living standards rose significantly and a more accomplished and robust culture was established."

"My great-grandfather became the most influential leader of this new society over the following decades. Many were more prominent in politics, but none had the impact that he did in Iceland. Like me, his great-grandson, more than a century later, he built a fortune and lost it. He was also able to build subsequent fortunes, so he will continue to be my guiding light. And his story illustrates much about my family and Iceland and my role in both."

"We used our majority stake and the support of other shareholders to merge Delta and Pharmaco in 2002; in 2004 the merged company changed its name to Actavis. I felt a great sense of achievement in having created one of the largest companies in Iceland, with a research and development arm that complemented its manufacturing operations in, and cash flow from, eastern Europe. Actavis continued to grow but went through a lot of change. One of the Bulgarian entrepreneurs left and sold his stake in 2002 and the other departed a year later. But the Pharmaco deals established me in Bulgaria and in the wider banking markets too. In 2001 and 2002, when I was pitching to investment banks in London, we had turnover of just $150 million and they would hardly give us the time of day. But our growth, both by acquisition and organic, increased that figure fivefold."