Kreditkassen

"The rescue came from Kreditkassen. In retrospect, it is more than a miracle. In the spring of 1991, when the Norwegian banking system in general, and Kreditkassen in particular, were speeding towards the abyss, a loan of nearly one and a half billion was assembled for the Fredriksen system. K-bank was supposed to have participated in the original loan syndicate under Bankers Trust, and stood by its customer when everything collapsed. Fredriksen's insider, Carl Steen, managed to navigate the gigantic loan past the bank's board without anyone making a fuss. Just months later, the bank was under administration, and it would have been easier to steal the money in the vault than to borrow it."

"In January 1996, fortune turned for John Fredriksen. True, NAS went bust, but that was a trifle. More importantly, Kreditkassen once again stood behind its most important shipping customer. Calle Steen and his team managed to involve an international banking syndicate in lending the Fredriksen group 230 million dollars based on the rising ship values. Suddenly, Fredriksen had 650 million kroner in cash, and with bright prospects in the industry, the money was burning a hole in his pocket. Just days after NAS went bust, Fredriksen attempted a blitz attack on the drilling company Neddrill in the Netherlands. Once again, he chose a target with great values but little cash in hand. It takes no prize to guess that the idea was one of the first from CFO Trøim. He had extensive knowledge of Neddrill, a subsidiary of the shipping company Nedlloyd. Trøim's former boss, Torstein Hagen, had for many years tried to gain control of Nedlloyd. Neddrill had nine drilling rigs valued at over 2 billion, and Fredriksen would have become a major player in offshore overnight. But there too, another hunter came in from the sidelines, and Fredriksen was left spurned. He just had to swallow his pride."

"For an ordinary debt collection agency, growth depends on acquiring new corporate customers with many bad payers. The secret is to recruit diligent employees and create good routines for following up on cases. In the fifteen years Norbrekken ran collections, it was good business, but his major coup came when he realized the gold mines hidden in the major banks' loan portfolios. Aktiv Kapital's first coup was to buy all the loan letters from Storebrand Finans. There was a lot of consumer loans, not too high amounts on each. Thus, he could let the fee machine run, and the poor customers soon discovered that it was not enough to pay the original debt. Now, interest and fees had to be paid. A loan of 4500 kroner could easily end up costing over 17,000 kroner in the end. The really big coup for Aktiv Kapital was in 2003, when they secured all the defaulted loans from Nordea, formerly Kreditkassen. For just 262.5 million kroner, they took over the debt relations of 21,200 Norwegian private individuals who collectively owed 3.7 billion kroner."