Skrinet

"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."

"Our acquisition of Skrinet in March 1985 was my best deal—and my most challenging. It provided me with serious resources to build my business sphere, but with a level of drama I could have done without. From the joy of having completed the purchase, I was thrown into a total crisis two weeks later. It wasn't that I was about to go bankrupt, it was worse—I had absolutely nothing left. I have described the solution in some context as: "The speed saved me. If you are sailing with ice skates at a hundred kilometers per hour, the ice doesn't need to be so thick. If I had stopped, I would have gone through the ice.""

"It all began as a thought and a discussion at our kitchen table and matured during the winter of 1984/85 into a plan to take over Skrinet, a conglomerate of shareholdings and operating companies that had been rapidly built up in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s by Bo Sandell."

"Bo Sandell's investment company Skrinet was listed on the stock exchange in 1977 and quickly acquired positions in nearly a hundred small and medium-sized companies as well as a couple of larger stakes in big businesses. He was very skilled at winning the trust of family business owners and solving their succession problems in high-tax Sweden at the time, under the threat of employee funds. Skrinet grew, restructured its companies rapidly, and the market value soared in the early 1980s."

"My first focus was Skrinet's shareholding in Boliden, a competent mining company that had been training on complicated and low-grade minerals in the hard-processed Swedish bedrock since the 1920s. Over the years, the company had built up outstanding exploration expertise, leading-edge techniques for mining, enrichment, and world-class smelters. The industry is notoriously volatile with large fluctuations in results following global metal prices, but Boliden has weathered the valleys thanks to good strategies and skilled management. However, the volatility has always been discouraging. Boliden had rarely had long-term stable owners. I saw significant value potential in Boliden, including a structural business and divesting the company's power interests."

"Till Anders Wall also went Michael Hasselqvist, who managed the finance company Nyckeln, which we had acquired from Bo Sandell's Skrinet. He bought out Nyckeln. These shares were later distributed among several parties, all of whom suffered some losses. Like most finance companies at the time, it easily obtained bank financing for its needs, and there was a market for Nyckeln's certificates. Moreover, at that time, banks referred all top loans to the finance companies, which was wise. Less wise, however, was that banks extended so much credit to the finance companies. This was the foundation for Nyckeln's collapse, which initiated the great financial and real estate crisis in the early 1990s."

"In the group surrounding Bo Sandell, there were a number of energetic people of varying quality who pushed for larger power-related deals. There were some significant positions in established large companies such as the rubber company Trelleborg via the investment company Hevea, controlled by Skrinet, the mining company Boliden, and the trading wholesaler Ahlsell. Bo Sandell's colleague Michael Hasselqvist built up the finance company Nyckeln but eventually left Skrinet for other tasks with Anders Wall, the big star of the 1980s and a pioneer in bold corporate deals with his Beijerinvest. Nyckeln later acquired a new ownership group outside of Skrinet and met a grim fate during the financial crisis in Sweden in 1990."