Salomon

"The news had sent Salomon’s shares into a tailspin. Buffett s belief that the selling was overdone and that the firm’s ability to generate cash essentially was unchanged gave Tisch two powerfully compelling reasons to buy: ( 1 ) it was a deeply discounted, valuable asset, and (2) it might help a friend whose judgment had yielded Tisch millions of dollars."

"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."