London Stock Exchange

"When he took over from his father in 1990 after nearly three decades of tutelage, Hong Leong and its subsidiary companies were largely focused on Singapore with scattered business interests in a few Asian territories, such as Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Kwek turned it into a bona fide global enterprise with businesses in five continents, including at one point listing his proud hotel empire on the London Stock Exchange — the first Singapore company to do so."

"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."