Thor Bjorgolfsson

"Just as the past 100 years have been called the American century, the one we are in now will probably go down in history as Asia’s. In the West, we have grown up with an intrinsic belief that life inevitably gets better with every generation. The quality of life increases, life expectation grows longer and we all become a little wealthier. This may be true in a general sense, but will it always be? Who knows? But in striving for better times it is sensible to try to learn lessons from the past, even though human fallibility means that the mistakes of the past will almost inevitably crop up again somehow, somewhere. One just has to watch the cryptocurrency space and day-trader activity over the next few years for fresh evidence of that."

"Magga was a mentor to me, teaching me how to build up my self-confidence and engage with people, selling ideas and products."

"Extracting myself from my misplaced investments in Icelandic banks was much more difficult. I knew that I could not sell the 40 per cent stake in Landsbanki or the 38 per cent holding in Straumur, the Icelandic investment bank of which I was chairman. I held both stakes jointly with my father but realised that they were simply too large a piece of the financial infrastructure for them to be allowed to be sold without a great deal of time-consuming regulatory scrutiny. And I had grave concerns about the strength of the krona, the management of the Central Bank and Iceland’s financial system. I kept thinking of what had happened in Russia ten years earlier. The Icelandic krona was being artificially strengthened by the government, which was offering foreign investors krona-denominated bonds at excessive rates of interest."

"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…"

"Like everyone else I got sucked into the herd mentality, and I started to believe the boom would last. In 2006 I thought that what was happening was unsustainable."

"It appealed to me partly because the bankers and the entrepreneurs were all itching to put their own money into this project. I immediately formed the view that this opportunity was one that came…"

"The tools that I had in the 1990s and mid-2000s – mainly the flood of leverage that allowed a different way of thinking about business opportunities – are no longer available so I have to adapt my approach."

"he analysed the risks before he bet, and his bet paid off."

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; … … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. from Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’"

"I still ask myself time and again why I did the Landsbanki deal in 2002, choosing to become the biggest investor in Iceland’s banking system. The answer, I suppose, is ambition or weakness in the form of a need for recognition in my home country. Ego certainly played a large part. However, hubris started creeping in, slowly but surely in the following years."

"‘I usually approach investments from a contrarian standpoint. I want to enter markets where there are not many other participants or capital sources and the risks form a natural barrier to entry.’"

"Rudyard Kipling at his word, and ‘meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same’."

"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."

"Thor Jensen,"

"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…"

"for a company that I bought at a valuation of $20 million in 1999 and sold when it had revenues of almost $2.5 billion 13 years later. I originally put only $4.5 million into a privatisation of a company with revenues of $100 million. I am still a shareholder and now have a stake of just under 2 per cent in a company worth about $60 billion. So Play represents my entrepreneurial side and Actavis my financial engineering side, with mergers and acquisitions always at the fore."

"I have a family to think of, so I’m looking to do what a classic family man does: to preserve wealth for me and my family and then work out how to give the rest away because I think excessive inherited wealth can be a curse on future generations."

"know many of you here are worried about the current global financial crisis and its effect on your future career. I have strongly advocated that this crisis is not an isolated event that will sort itself out and go back to the way things were. I believe that this is fundamentally a process of real evolution of the financial system with profound changes taking shape now and in the near future. Therefore as you plan your future, I would like you to consider carefully what Darwin said about evolution, and I quote: ‘It is not the strongest of the species which survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.’ You need to be very flexible in the future and embrace change. In my case, for instance, the road from graduation to my current job is almost too unreal to be true, but it is basically a story of how things never go as you plan – but may still turn out as you want."

"The similarities between the bet I made on the Russian brewery with my American investors and what I was doing now with Actavis were striking. It was no less than a game of double or quits."

"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."

"well. At Novator we have developed much longer risk matrixes and are operating on quarterly rather than annual balance sheets, which makes the risk factors much more transparent."

"unrest are essentially structural, which is a problem for a business world that often fails to appreciate structural issues. I see strong similarities in some of these nations with the overturning of communism in Russia and eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

"Nathan Rothschild famously said that you should buy when there’s blood in the streets, even when it’s your own blood."

"They had maybe €100 million to their name but it was all done through Johannesson, who had leveraged them up and put them into various businesses and instruments. They were sky high on monopoly money and just wanted to take more and more turns. They had no sense that this was not a game."

"We have changed how we function internally, of course. In terms of risk management, we at Novator spend much more time on analysing risks in each project in our group than before."

"Play reminds me of Bravo, my Russian beer company, in its early days. Both are consumer companies that are youth-oriented in their users and their employees. Their advertising is similar. They have hungry young sales people, and even the same kinds of offices. The atmosphere is frugal and energetic. Play is still a start-up growing at double-digit percentage rates, though the bond issue means it now has to slow down the growth and become more profitable."

"It’s like the old fable about a scorpion asking a frog to carry it across a river. The frog’s fears of being stung are allayed by the scorpion pointing out that doing this would drown them both. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back but halfway across the river stings it, dooming them both. ‘Why did you do this?’ asks the dying frog. ‘It’s in my nature,’ are the scorpion’s last words."

"Deals are in my nature, but nature evolves and I need to as well. At Novator we have developed much longer risk matrixes and are operating on quarterly rather than annual balance sheets, which makes the risk factors much more transparent."

"Partnership is becoming my strategy too. After spending most of my career largely taking my own risks, the constraints of my Darwin agreement with my banking creditors, coupled with my lower risk appetite (and hopefully with a wiser head on my shoulders), mean that I am now looking to share opportunities."

"Calculating that there were large profits to be made for the first outsider to successfully launch a premium beer brand in newly capitalist Russia, I set up shop in the Wild East and built the nation’s biggest foreign-owned brewery start-up, selling out for hundreds of millions of dollars ten years later."

"What does a deal-aholic think about when he wakes up in the morning with a dull thud in his head? I am not interested in financial architecture or in predicting the regulatory weather, nor do I rely on structural change. Economies and their markets, their regulators and their rules are constantly changing. A proficient…"

"It peaked when I bought a Bulgarian telecoms group, BTC. My leverage on that deal was 95 per cent, meaning I only had to put up 5 per cent of the funds myself. I was hooked."

"You could call it storm-riding financial markets. Such situations develop only when people are scared and do not understand the risks. I act like one of the advance guards who seeks to establish an entrenched advantage. I am not a mercenary. I am accountable. My personal reputation and wealth are at…"

"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."

"Actavis, a generic pharmaceutical business where I was the largest shareholder, had become a public company with a stock market capitalisation of about $50 million – so small that London investment bankers would barely give me the time of day. But Actavis grew phenomenally both organically and…"

"When the markets seized up and the appetite for risk diminished, my personal capacity to exploit opportunities became much more restricted. But a bit of cold turkey is not altogether a bad thing. It allows me to reflect on how I got here and…"

"In the boom years, along with countless others, I worshipped the god of leverage. In my best year, I made $1.3 billion from merging, floating and spinning off businesses. Then I looked to do it all again. I was always happiest when deals, ideally more than one at a time, were in view. I liked to call what I did visionary and similar in some ways to chess, in that I was always planning the game several moves…"

"What was it like to add $2 billion to my personal wealth in the space of just two years? It certainly wasn’t ‘easy come, easy go’, although that is how it might look now, but it was definitely rapid. I made my first $100…"

"I remember in Russia, when we were making beer, our management accountants were asking about our margins and we were telling them that they were about 25 per cent before overheads. Then my deputy came in and said: ‘Thor. We’re buying all these raw materials. Why are we doing that when we can get 25 per cent on Russian state bonds right now? Why don’t we lower production and just buy three-month short-term bonds at a guaranteed 25 per cent. We’ll get a much better return on it.’"

"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."

"meltdown. As an instinctive entrepreneur, I am always driving away at things. When they go right, people tell me I’m a visionary, but that doesn’t always compensate for the effort, the stress and the times when disaster strikes. As I get older, I’m finding that I’m not always up for it. I had enormous hunger in my youth; I don’t need to be so hungry now. And I am changing my attitude to risk."

"Actavis, in all its guises, was my biggest, most profitable and most complicated investment. It sums up the way I like to do business. In its early days, it involved putting together an equity consortium in a privatisation in eastern Europe. Then there was a reverse takeover of a listed company, the spin-off of its core business, a hostile cross-border takeover of another listed company, a…"

"He managed to make some money in Bordeyri by learning to bind notebooks and selling them. He then used his earnings to buy sheep, paying farmers to keep and feed them. In turn, he sold lambs to those involved in the booming export trade to the UK’s fast-growing cities and bought more sheep with the proceeds. After five years he had cash in hand and a good-sized herd. After his stay in Bordeyri, Thor was hired by a merchant in Borgarnes on a decent wage. But he still kept his sheep and expanded further, buying land in Borgarfjordur and hiring a keeper. Within a short time, he became the town’s leading sheep farmer, again making his money from the export trade."

"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."

"This is a phase Carl Gustav Jung called youth. According to his rule of thumb it ends at around age 42. Adulthood has come knocking now, years that will yield more lasting accomplishments, ones that will sit better with me and with others. Or so Jung says."

"A lot of corners were cut and the chaotic nature of the joint venture meant that it was effectively stillborn. The Russians, who owned 35% of the venture, contributed the land and buildings, and Ingimar and Bernard (who had a 65% stake) were supposed to contribute the old Icelandic bottling machinery and some start-up funds. Magnus, my father and I were supposed to be running the venture for the stakeholders who had contributed the machinery and the factory. We had no stake in the venture, but the hope – and promise – of earning equity if the business prospered. However, after the equipment arrived and was commissioned, we discovered that the BVI guys had tricked our Russian partners and Russian customs. Instead of contributing the machinery in return for share capital and thereby avoiding customs duties and taxes as start-ups could legally do, the manifest listed just some items of furniture and supplies. The BVI guys set up another offshore company that ‘owned’ the machinery to take leasing payments from the Russian factory’s monthly cash flow. They had tried to get UK investors for the joint venture and failed. They did put in a small amount of money but then tried to extract funds, as they did not believe the venture would ever become profitable – obviously influenced by their failure to get any investors, which was probably because they had no track record as principals in any deals, let alone risky emerging-market deals."

"Again it signalled a breach of trust, this time between the Icelandic establishment, me and my family. I knew I didn’t want to be part of the system in this country."

"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."

"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."

"But another thing struck me as I sat there in front of TV. I felt I was now responsible for the family and realised I had to grow up overnight. The magnitude of this realisation was extraordinary. As I walked down the big wooden staircase from the TV room, I just thought to myself: ‘He’s gone. I have to try to take control of this situation.’"

"Then my father was hired to run a soft drinks and brewery company which had a Pepsi franchise. It had just won a contract to give a massive push to Lowenbrau, whose market share in Iceland had dropped from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. I took a four-month job there and got to know Magnus Thorsteinsson, the head of the brewery, who was from the north of Iceland. An odd couple with a complementary skill set, we went on to work together closely over the following ten years."

"After a dispute with the merchant who employed him, Thor borrowed money from Scottish traders he had got to know in Borgarnes and opened his own store in nearby Akranes, and at the same time continued to expand his sheep business. By not only investing his own funds but also taking loans to expand even further, he was as it turned out buying into a bubble."

"Out along the edge Is always where I burn to be The further on the edge The hotter the intensity Kenny Loggins, ‘Danger Zone’"

"My father was a broken man during the years this was going on and I was always trying to find a way to help. I remember going to the gym and pumping it up and saying to myself: ‘My father is in prison and there’s nothing I can do.’ At the same time a voice was saying ‘Come on, do something, do something, do something’, yet I couldn’t do anything. My father said to me: ‘Get an education abroad. Try to free yourself of all this. Don’t be plugged into the old Icelandic system. Try to find your fortune in a bigger thing.’ It was the greatest advice he ever gave me."

"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."

"Ever-increasing production led to a slump in prices in some years. To strengthen their position, farmers created associations that dealt with sheep merchants, sometimes even bypassing them entirely and selling directly to Scotland. These associations were early manifestations of what would later become the trade co-operatives, which were to have a marked influence on Icelandic society and my great-grandfather’s life in particular, much to his displeasure."

"Then my father told me he was thinking of doing something really off the wall. He had sold the Pepsi franchise and was left with just the brewery, an old soft drinks factory and a non-compete clause that prohibited it from making soft drinks for sale in Iceland."

"It worked, and she made up the company as she went along. I worked with her sometimes and got my first taste of a start-up business. She was good at selling and had immense confidence in herself and her idea."

"We rebuilt the factory so we could make soft drinks, and I was told that I would be there for six months with an option to extend to a year. My job was to create a brand, set up the marketing operation and train a Russian to take over, but I ended up staying in Russia for ten years. I had planned to build the factory and go back to New York, but in Russia, as in life, things often do not go to plan."

"The Russian joint venture went ahead in 1993 under the name Baltic Bottling Plant. Magnus was in charge of setting up the factory and I was in charge of marketing. We made two reconnaissance trips. We took a look, came back and said: ‘It’s a bizarre place but let’s see what we can do.’ We had heard that Russians wanted something colourful so we produced a batch of pink lemonade and shipped a couple of containers to Russia. I toured the shops, carrying out market research and trying to gauge the demand for soft drinks. But Russia was pretty chaotic at that time. I came across empty supermarket shelves and long lines of people queuing for food; the shops smelled and the service was dreadful. But I realised that we could make something there. Even though we had old products, they could still work. That is what Russia became in those years: a dumping ground for old stock."

"Coming from the US, where everyone greeted me sweetly and asked how I was, it was a shock to arrive in Russia. If you asked a Russian how he was, you were likely to get the answer, ‘Better today than tomorrow.’ The Russians were a pessimistic bunch, used to hearing about grand three- or five-year plans without ever seeing anything getting better. So maybe it’s harsh to say that they were pessimists; perhaps they were just well-informed optimists."

"The advertising law in Iceland was very strict and you could not advertise alcohol. We needed something innovative, so I created a travelling beer festival. We did a lot of camouflaged advertising, obtained a lot of media coverage and sold a lot of beer."

"I had found a way to recreate a product that had a history in Russia because it had been imported from Finland. It was not registered in Russia so we could copy it. And there was no copyright in Finland because of a strange arrangement whereby the archaic Finnish state monopoly had an alcopop formula which it gave to one of three breweries every other year. This arrangement, where each brewery could produce for two years before handing on the rights, had been going for decades."

"Alcopops – fruit-based long drinks infused with a shot of liquor – had been sold for some time in Finland and had recently taken off in London. A small quantity of Finnish gin and grapefruit was even being imported into Russia. I could see that alcopops would be a winner in the Russian market because there was no culture of mixing drinks; it was just shots of vodka for men and champagne for women. It was as simple and basic as…"

"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…"

"In the Actavis takeover, I made a public offer for the company worth €5.3 billion, putting up 20 per cent of the equity and borrowing the rest. This was the largest European private equity deal in 2007. I still find it incredible when I think about it, but I was hardly alone in my hunger for top-of-the-market profit dollars. Indeed, I was inundated with bankers who wanted desperately to be in on the deal. Some were hammering at the door to get in but it was being kept firmly shut by those on the inside. ‘No. We’re not letting any other bank in,’ they told me. ‘Guys,’ I said. ‘You’re lending €4 billion here. Don’t you want to…"

"After that I became extremely wary, almost paranoid, in dealing with anyone from Russia. I would head-butt my way through every problem. My one advantage was that I was a young man with no family. I could not be bought or threatened and I found that, as with most bullies, if I didn’t give in to the Tambovs, they would move away and look for weaker prey. I also thought that if I did crash and burn I had plenty of time to start another career. So I worked hard and partied even harder, drinking lots of vodka with other expats. It was like being in an American frontier town. It was a steep learning curve and it changed me. I was responsible for everything, and it was all so badly set up that I never knew if I would have enough money to pay my workers every month."

"No matter how difficult all was, it had also set up an opportunity for me which would play out over a decade. His crazy idea in Russia would essentially be my launchpad into the career I made for…"

"At the age of 27, with only rudimentary conversational Russian, I was asked by the BVI guys to take over as managing director. For me there was only one way to make the venture work. Selling soft drinks was a low-margin and in the end unprofitable activity. No one was…"

"As a result of the Russian economic crisis our investors were exercising their right to renegotiate the deal. I flew to London and spent about a week negotiating day and night from a small room at the Metropolitan Hotel, where I and my lawyer lived on room service. Capital Research no longer wanted to equity-fund the project, so we decided to change all the equity in the financing to debt. And, with valuations so uncertain, we agreed to disagree on the value of the company at that time. Capital Research would provide the capital as debt – but it was expensive debt. There was a 30 per cent interest rate and the right to convert into ordinary shares at a 20 per cent discount; effectively it meant that we were borrowing money at 40 per cent per year. Furthermore, if the company was not sold in four years’ time, Capital had the right to appoint an investment bank to sell the business. I had taken on a lot and now found myself in a race. Within three or four years, we had to build up and sell the business. There was a very real chance that I would end up with nothing. After all, it was a loan at 40 per cent interest!"

"The Russian beer market was really taking off. For every can of ‘long’ drinks sold in Russia, 40 times as much beer was being consumed, and the market was growing at 20 per cent a year. If we could win just a 5 per cent share, that business would be much larger than anything we were doing in alcopops. Beer was a complementary product, distributed by the same dealers and sold in the same bars. We had the connections. We just needed the capital and the sheer nerve to do it. We focused on long drinks from 1996 to 1998 and started our brewery project the…"

"We designed the Bravo brewery in a modular way that allowed us to quickly scale up production. I took advice from brewery experts in Denmark who told me that the typical mistake people make in designing breweries is that they do not allow themselves room to grow. So we started at a capacity of 1 million hectolitres, with a three-stage plan to take it to 2.5 million hectolitres and then 4.5 million hectolitres."

"We parked two of them in the middle of the square and started selling cans of beer. We had the first canning line in Russia, so while competitors were making people queue to get foaming plastic glasses of beer, we could just pass out cool-looking cans. It was a hot summer’s day and we had our beer revolution. All the cans were bedecked in our logo. You couldn’t go 10 metres in St Petersburg without seeing our name. It was ambush marketing and it worked brilliantly. I still regard it as one of the best days of my life. I thought: ‘We are just small guys … just look at this … we’ve got to utilise our momentum to the max.’ At that stage only the first third of the factory was complete, but we pushed the other stages through quickly. Our products were everywhere in Russia. We were players in St Petersburg – a city of 5 million people. I bought my own apartment. It was great. When we got to 4.5 million hectolitres, we had the sixth-largest brewery in Europe."

"But when we started rebuilding the factory, level one guys were cruising around. ‘You’re going to need some protection around here because somebody might come and steal your equipment,’ they said. We said okay and signed up with an organisation that had dogs and security guys patrolling. But they also said that if anyone bothered us, made a threat or just wanted to know who we were, we should just give them their number. And we did have a few incidents. Sometimes, some guys would roll up in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and say: ‘Hey, what are you up to? You’ve got to pay us a percentage.’ We said: ‘Guys, just call this number here.’ And we didn’t hear back from them. They were mostly trying it on."

"My view was that I had signed up for a tour of duty for up to ten years. I would do it and then go somewhere else and settle down. My friends were all getting married and having children, but that was not an option for me at that time. I was well aware of the ‘tender trap’, which was basically hooking up with a Russian woman who then became pregnant. I didn’t want to end up being somehow a part of Russia. It was always a case of going in, making money and coming out again. Of course, I still have an emotional tie to Russia because of my time there."

"Rusinov gave me advice on how to deal with threats, both real and implied. ‘What’s in here?’ people would ask. ‘Are you a tough guy or not?’ If you held your nerve and didn’t answer, they mostly just walked away. ‘There’s nothing here,’ they would say to each other, or ‘We’ve got somebody here we can miss.’"

"I took the lead in the meeting and I guess I put on a good show, as we still did the deal, selling to Heineken for $400 million, including a $50 million earn-out if we met certain targets. The date was 20 February 2002. As part of the deal, Heineken asked me to stay on as chairman for two years. A lot of capacity came on stream in the Russian beer market in 2002 and we did not hit the target. I still made $100 million from the Heineken deal, more than I had ever made or had before."

"There were dangers, but this was my time to make a fortune. I recognised that the era I was operating in presented a unique opportunity and I told myself: ‘Nothing that you do after Russia can be harder than this.’ I would always try to keep focused. I wanted to build a business and then exit and start all over again. Anything else would be a distraction."

"don’t know what they want from me It’s like the more money we come across The more problems we see Notorious B.I.G., ‘Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems’"

"Some investment bankers I’d met through fundraising for the Bravo venture came to me and said they knew two entrepreneurs of my age in Bulgaria who were having a hard time finding somebody to invest in their company. ‘It’s a privatisation,’ they said, and my ears pricked up. For me, eastern European privatisations meant the…"

"The next stage of my eastern European adventure capitalism could not have been more different, however. It would involve consorting with prime ministers in the corridors of power and it would lead to riches that even I, with my limitless ambition and hunger to make my way in the world, could never have dreamt of."

"went back to Pharmaco, the listed Icelandic pharmaceutical company that originally sold us the machinery for the Russian bottling venture. I had my father talk to the boss as I thought I might have found something for us to take a look at together. Pharmaco had become an investment vehicle and was behaving like a conglomerate. It was cash-rich and…"

"Within a single decade in post-communist Russia, I had gone from having practically nothing to having millions of dollars in my bank account. However, if anyone had told me that I would be able to multiply this 40 times over the next six years,"

"Meanwhile, almost as soon as we had done the Pharmaco reverse takeover of Balkanpharma we had set about spinning off the Icelandic distribution arm in order to get cash to buy…"

"came up with the idea of reversing Balkanpharma into Pharmaco, simultaneously buying out the bank. To do that we arranged an issue of new shares. At the same time, Deutsche Bank sold more than half of its shares in a deal giving 60 per cent of the combined business to Balkanpharma’s investors. I ended up with just under 40 per cent of the new group and the bank had less than 20 per cent."

"Almost by accident in 2003, shortly after I moved to London, I received a call from Advent International, a private equity group. ‘Thor,’ they said. ‘We know you from the brewery financing talks in Russia. We’ve watched what you did there and are kicking ourselves for not having invested but here’s another opportunity. We’re bidding on a privatisation of the major Bulgarian telecoms company BTC. We remember you were in a privatisation in the…"

"We closed the deal in the middle of 1999 and the whole business became Balkanpharma. Our biggest market by far was exports to Russia, but Bulgaria was also strong. Annual revenues were about $100 million when I became chairman, and by 2000 Deutsche Bank was already looking for an exit. ‘We’ve got a three-year plan but we’d like to see if we can accelerate our exit,’ one of the bankers told me. I was in no hurry. In the year since doing the Bulgarian deal, my father and I had invested in Pharmaco, becoming the largest shareholders. So I thought: ‘Let’s find a way to use the bank to get some cash on the table.’"

"What deal could I do next to close this strategic gap? My answer was another acquisition and my preferred choice was Delta, an Icelandic developer of new generic drugs that had originally been formed by Pharmaco in 1981 and was two-thirds owned by it…"

"Pharmaco’s problem was that it had a manufacturing unit and distribution centre in Europe but no new drugs coming off patent. Delta looked ideal and we negotiated with its management about it reversing into Pharmaco, but we…"

"2001 dawned, I was chairman of the combined listed company in Iceland, the first time I had been in that position, but the new group’s two pharmaceutical arms were not a natural fit. We had a generic producer and supplier in eastern Europe and an Icelandic distributor of big pharmaceutical brands like Pfizer.…"

"My idea was simple. I knew eastern Europe and Russia on the ground and could negotiate through the minefields. But I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals. Pharmaco knew everything about pharmaceuticals from the distribution end…"

"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…"

"We decided to be bold and mount a hostile takeover of the newly merged business. We hired Delta’s advisers to advise us – once they had resolved any issue of conflict of interest – and set about calling all the shareholders, securing commitments for 51 per cent of the stock over a single day. When stock markets closed one Monday, Delta’s chief executive was on a plane, going somewhere to look for a company to acquire in eastern Europe. When he landed, he learned that the…"

"Through Novator, I saw myself pursuing a number of strategies. I could be an activist in a public company or a caretaker or midwife in a private equity situation, taking assets, cleaning them up and getting to a position from which I could exit."

"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."

"It was a busy time for me: within a month of bidding for Landsbanki, I also engineered the Pharmaco–Delta pharmaceuticals merger, creating the company that would later become Actavis. Now, at the age of 35, I had most of my assets in the country, controlling with my father two of its biggest companies."

"I’m not looking for the next rocket. I’m looking for a much more moderate future. I don’t feel the need to prove myself any more and I have a family to think of, so I’m looking to do what a classic family man does: to preserve wealth for me and my family and then work out how to give the rest away because I think excessive inherited wealth can be a curse on future generations. When you’re young, you’re terrified of life generally, but you still take risks that you wouldn’t countenance when you’re older because by then you know a lot more about the dangers. Life becomes about limiting the downside, which also hinders the upside."

"Perhaps not surprisingly much was made of my lifestyle: my former ‘penthouse’ Park Lane office, homes in Notting Hill and Buckinghamshire, and Challenger private jet in Farnborough; a 42-metre yacht called *Element*; my collection of luxury motorbikes; and an Aston Martin bearing my initials on the number plate. At the time of the article’s publication I neither used nor operated the private jet or yacht, as they were sold after the crash. I still have the old Aston Martin and six motorbikes. Since the 2008 crisis, I have become accustomed to heavy public scrutiny of my private life."

"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."

"financially engineering ventures on the back of as much leverage as I could muster with an eye for mergers, spin-offs and other ways of creating value."

"I refuse to be classed alongside such operators. I have lived abroad for 26 years, more than half my life. I don’t have Icelandic funds to invest abroad. I earned my capital abroad and made the mistake of ploughing much of it back into Iceland. Others started businesses in Iceland and leveraged their local assets to acquire businesses abroad. I did things the other way around, bringing money into the country. When I sold my companies in Russia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, I was paid in cash, not in paper, and that cash paid for Actavis and was pumped into Iceland’s financial system. I did not sell a single share in Landsbanki, Actavis or Straumur, the investment bank of which I was chairman."

"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."

"Extracting myself from my misplaced investments in Icelandic banks was much more difficult. I knew that I could not sell the 40 per cent stake in Landsbanki or the 38 per cent holding in Straumur, the Icelandic investment bank of which I was chairman. I held both stakes jointly with my father but realised that they were simply too large a piece of the financial infrastructure for them to be allowed to be sold without a great deal of time-consuming regulatory scrutiny. And I had grave concerns about the strength of the krona, the management of the Central Bank and Iceland’s financial system. I kept thinking of what had happened in Russia ten years earlier. The Icelandic krona was being artificially strengthened by the government, which was offering foreign investors krona-denominated bonds at excessive rates of interest. As the coupon on the bonds went from 10 per cent to 12 per cent then 14 per cent and 16 per cent, my forebodings grew. More and more it seemed like Russia all over again, with a government boosting interest rates to get cash so it could fund itself; and the krona exchange rate was just as artificial as that of the rouble in 1998. But this time it was happening in my own country where I was heavily exposed to the economy. I needed an exit plan."

"What have I learned? That legacy problems always come back to haunt you; to always deal with things systematically; and to always try to tie up loose ends. There is another lesson too, which comes as much from my advancing years as from my financial meltdown. As an instinctive entrepreneur, I am always driving away at things. When they go right, people tell me I’m a visionary, but that doesn’t always compensate for the effort, the stress and the times when disaster strikes. As I get older, I’m finding that I’m not always up for it. I had enormous hunger in my youth; I don’t need to be so hungry now. And I am changing my attitude to risk. As a young man, I used to fret that people did not see the wood for the trees. I find myself in that position now. When I look at opportunities, I see risks everywhere. Am I wiser or just more risk-averse because I have been burnt? It’s a natural reflex. Will it impair my entrepreneurial abilities in the future? I think it probably will. Actually, I would say that this experience will complement my abilities with very valuable experience; the kind that you can only learn the hard way. Misfortune breeds perseverance, and I have been through a great deal of misfortune, so I would basically say that I am now better off than before. It’s a hard fact for me to admit, but it is undeniable reality."

"Analysts came in and ascribed to Actavis a value in a freefall insolvency of just €1.4 billion, leaving a gap of €4.4 billion on what Deutsche Bank was owed. That would have crystallised a loss of more than €4 billion for the bank, so it had a serious problem. We started negotiating and agreed to restructure. Deutsche Bank did not revalue the loan until later, when the dust from the financial storm had settled. The whole thing was somewhat opaque and the numbers were well hidden in the annual report and only seen by those who knew what to look for. As for my own losses, when I took Actavis private my equity in the deal was €1 billion, after which I put in the additional €150 million I borrowed. It all went. My equity in Actavis became worthless. People say: ‘Was that real equity?’ But the point is that we had interest from other companies that were willing to pay that price at the time of Actavis being taken private. I could have walked away with over €1 billion if I had decided to be a seller, like other Actavis shareholders who sold out for cash at the time. Instead, I stayed in the company, making an earn-out deal with Deutsche Bank under which I was able to earn fresh, new equity."

"One element was my relationship with Kristin. During the boom years, she mainly stayed in London while I was travelling the world on business. We had our first child in 2005, at the peak of my professional life, and it was a tough time: she wanted to settle down while I was buying a jet and a yacht and buzzing around the world. It was not a good time for our relationship and we separated in 2006 for some months, later getting back together. This doesn’t reflect well on me, but I guess I came late to fatherhood and needed time to adjust to the idea."

"How much did I have to liquidate? Almost everything. All the assets in publicly quoted shares went, and my investment in Landsbanki went from being worth €1.7 billion at the beginning of the year to €600 million by 4 pm on Friday 3 October before ultimately falling to zero on the Monday, the following business day. Straumur survived but had to write down its assets by 50 per cent; its shares then plummeted, trading at less than a third of book value. It’s amazing that so much value could be lost over a single weekend, and now of course the sceptics say: ‘Did you ever make all that money? Was it ever there?’ or: ‘How could you lose it so fast?’ But it just went, destroyed by the international financial bomb that had hit Iceland. As with the blast effect of any bomb, the damage spreads ever further from the initial point of impact to reach buildings on the periphery so that they eventually collapse or become so unsafe that they have to be pulled down."

"Following the events after the Lehman crash, at first I had the classic feelings of trauma: shock at the realisation of what was going on and adrenalin rushes to sell, meet pressures here and run around putting out fires there. Then there was an enormous amount of anger: with the politicians, with the people who worked with me, with the bankers and most of all with myself. You could call it gutless arrogance and rage. There were external and internal accusations. How the hell did this happen? Why didn’t I see the signs and take avoiding action? Why did I hire so and so or fire a particular executive? I asked all these questions and more with increasing bitterness. Then I got to the final phase of sadness. It’s just really sad and you start to lack the will to do much about it. I’m a fighter and I went every day to fight during the crisis. But I could feel my energy sapping and a voice in my head asking: ‘What’s it all for?’"

"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."

"All this was spinning around in 2009 when I fulfilled a longstanding engagement to give the graduation speech for the Stern Business School of New York University, my alma mater. I had accepted the invitation gladly, but by the time the graduation ceremony came about in 2009, my world had crumbled. I contacted the university and asked if they wanted to reconsider their choice of speaker, given that the global financial markets crash had also seen almost my entire business empire come crashing down. The university’s president, John Sexton, replied swiftly. ‘Thor,’ he said, ‘of course we want you to do it – now more than ever. The business world has its ups and downs and we need to remind people of that, so it’s ideal for someone who has just gone through a perfect storm to share his experience.’ I was grateful, but at the same time unsure of how well I would cope with giving the speech. With all that was happening, I was in limbo in so many ways."

"I was in New York for a board meeting and I met up with Siggi in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to flush out what Watson’s ideas were. Joining us in the meeting was Watson’s chief executive Paul Bisaro. As they began to describe their vision for the company and the sector, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of it. Paul and I had crossed swords before in the very public battle for the Croatian pharma company Pliva, where we had each fought with every trick we knew. He had won and I had lost. That was water under the bridge, and I explained the situation for each of the stakeholders in Actavis. Deutsche Bank was looking for no risk at all, while my Novator vehicle was willing to look at the big picture in terms of future value creation. Watson’s idea was to pay with cash and stock, and clearly that would not work for Deutsche, even if it could work for us. I needed to find a way to make this work for both the bank and Novator. As they say, the devil is in the detail."

"I know many of you here are worried about the current global financial crisis and its effect on your future career. I have strongly advocated that this crisis is not an isolated event that will sort itself out and go back to the way things were. I believe that this is fundamentally a process of real evolution of the financial system with profound changes taking shape now and in the near future. Therefore as you plan your future, I would like you to consider carefully what Darwin said about evolution, and I quote: ‘It is not the strongest of the species which survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.’ You need to be very flexible in the future and embrace change. In my case, for instance, the road from graduation to my current job is almost too unreal to be true, but it is basically a story of how things never go as you plan – but may still turn out as you want. To sum it all up, I probably do things the same way as most of you. I attempt to organise resources in an intuitive way. I have to be passionate about everything I venture into. I accept full responsibility for the outcome. And if every thing will turn sour in the end I can always say: ‘I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it left.’ So I cannot be other than happy, grateful and optimistic. Therefore, I say to you: never be afraid to lose out. That fear can keep you from betting big on your own intuition and reaping the rewards of your passion in work. This is what I want to leave you with as a thought, and I want to challenge you to bet on yourself, your intuition and your own talent at all times and especially if it is against the odds."

"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."

"My major business investment was about to get a second chance too. When at the airport about to depart on honeymoon to the Maldives, I was called by a former colleague, Sigurdur Oli Olafsson, who had previously been CEO of Actavis. Siggi Oli told me that his new company, US-listed Watson Pharmaceuticals, was interested in buying or merging with Actavis. He wanted to know if there was any way to achieve this in a low-key fashion, as the company was not interested in going into an auction. He said that Watson wanted to act soon, but understood from Deutsche Bank that a sale of Actavis was off the table for two years. He and his colleagues believed that a lot was going to happen in the world of generic pharmaceuticals in the following 24 months and the group had to move fast to be an acquirer instead of becoming a target."

"History will judge us not on the crashes we avoid, but on how we deal with the ones that inevitably happen."

"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."

"Mobile telecoms was a sector I knew well, having grown Play, my start-up in Poland, into a top-four independent challenger brand, and although Chile was on the other side of the Atlantic, it did bear some similarities to Play’s Polish homeland. Both were Catholic cultures with a high degree of conservatism. Another element they had in common was their domination by international behemoths. While Play in Poland was up against France’s Orange, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Polkomtel, whose Plus brand was 24 per cent owned by Britain’s Vodafone, Nextel Chile had to contend with Entel, the former nationalised Chilean telecoms company whose 127-metre Torre Entel literally towers over central Santiago. Entel controlled about 30 per cent of the Chilean mobile telecoms market. Then there were Movistar, owned by Spanish giant Telefonica, which held a market share of around 28 per cent, and Claro, part of the America Movil telecoms giant, famously fronted by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, which had 23 per cent. Nextel Chile had possessed about 2 per cent of the market as a total underdog, and even that was falling steadily. However, we had grown Play from nothing into the leading mobile telecoms company in Poland with a 27 per cent market share, and we saw a similar potential growth trajectory for this Chilean minnow. The financial elements of a deal had to be put together very quickly. We completed the whole transaction in about two months and it was only later that we learned how close Nextel Chile had actually been to bankruptcy wipe-out. We refinanced the company with $400 million of equity and $420 million of debt and set about finding a way to rebrand and reposition it as a vibrant independent challenger brand – a far cry from its previous image as a distant South American offshoot of a major US carrier."

"Actavis got over its 2008 management and operational problems and is now a good company with an excellent research and development pipeline. Its recent success has been driven by mergers and acquisitions. First, Actavis was taken over by America’s Watson Pharmaceuticals for €4.25 billion in 2012. The following year, the combined company merged with Ireland’s Warner Chilcott in a deal valued at $8.5 billion. In July 2014 it completed the acquisition of Forest Laboratories for $25 billion. Then Actavis bought Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox, for $70.5 billion, assuming the acquired company’s name. A $160 billion merger with Pfizer was abandoned and Allergan later sold its generic drugs business to Teva Pharmaceuticals for $40.5 billion before being acquired by America’s AbbVie for $63 billion in 2019. Not bad for a company that I bought at a valuation of $20 million in 1999. I originally put only $4.5 million into its privatisation when it had revenues of $100 million. By 2016, when I finalised the sale of my last remaining stake, I had made $1.1 billion from the company. But even before this, after five years in which the financial markets were effectively closed to me, the combined growth of my investments in Play and Actavis had by February 2014 made me – on paper, at least – a billionaire again."

"It was no surprise that the biggest crash in history elicited the largest ever post-mortem and, as someone who lost the best part of €4 billion in the events of 2008, I should probably have had a ringside seat at the inquisition. However, I was not asked to participate and had little interest in the government commissions, regulatory reviews and countless books probing what went wrong with the system and how it needs to be fixed. Cracks in the system have always existed. They may move around, die down and later emerge in a different place, just as the Earth’s geological core is constantly shifting, but we will always have the financial equivalent of fissures and faults in any system. Could the world’s financial system be better? Could some flaws be eradicated? Should it offer more protection to those least able to cope with financial losses? Yes, yes and yes again. But am I interested in wholesale revolutionary systemic changes? Do I want a new era of much greater regulatory oversight and do I think they would make a great deal of difference to the boom–bust cycle that countless politicians have unsuccessfully pledged to abolish? No, I do not. I have made my money from the cracks in systems. And that’s partly how I lost it as well."

"I decided that I had to focus more of my time and effort on being part of that future, while still keeping half my bets on the old industrial world with my investments in telecoms. After all, the telecom companies operate the key infrastructure that allows all of these internet-based businesses and communities to stay connected and blossom. I figured that it would be a wise move to have one foot on each side of the equation: the content on one side and the delivery system on the other. I knew that these new tech companies about to change the world were inherently risky investments, as well over 75 per cent of start-ups fail. So I needed to adjust my investment style for this sector, to allow for smaller stakes in more companies to diversify risk, instead of my old mantra of taking by far the biggest stake in a company in order to have more influence on its direction and control in case management was off-course. As a result, I started to get involved in a smaller capacity with many tech companies, which was a fresh direction that I liked."

"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."

"Branding is a personal passion of mine, dating back all the way to the Bravo venture in St Petersburg, and it felt exciting and invigorating to be essentially building a start-up again. But what should we call our new baby? After discarding an initial notion to use the Play brand, we looked for a similarly dynamic name behind which to build a challenger, customer-centric culture and asked half a dozen marketing agencies to pitch their best ideas. None of them came up with anything that we liked, but another firm which had not been invited to pitch came up with a left-of-field suggestion that resonated with us straight away. Its concept was to brand the challenger around the ‘word-of-mouth’, viral way that we wanted to grow through personal recommendations offering great value and customer-centred service. ‘Word of mouth’ was shortened to WOM and that became our brand. My idea was to build a new Latin American challenger mobile telecoms brand using the playbook of Play in Poland and Nova in Iceland. I could use the same management team and external consultants who worked on both. The partners at Novator responsible for telecoms, who had worked with me since 2010, focused on financing the new venture and acquiring the necessary spectrum and telecoms licences. Chris Bannister, a personable Brit who became Play’s first chief executive in 2005 and had already lived and worked in nine countries, was brought back into the fold as chief executive. And the Icelandic chief technology officer oversaw the technical build-out design, along with his Swedish colleague. Members of our trusted teams from both countries helped in the beginning to transform a failed old-school US telecoms operator into a state-of-the-art ‘kick-ass’ mobile challenger. None of us spoke Spanish and most had never set foot in Latin America before, let alone Chile. It didn’t seem to matter. When we launched, Chile was the most expensive country in the Latin American region in mobile telecommunication, so we saw a market that was fertile for a new approach. Conventional new entrants like Nextel and a venture headed by US telecoms billionaire John Malone had failed to crack the nation. We needed to do things very differently. To achieve the maximum impact and truly disrupt the market, we knew that a key differentiator had to be price. Indeed, we priced our services so aggressively that Chile immediately became the cheapest country in South America for consumer mobile telephony. Alongside this value offer, we promoted WOM as an independent challenger offering honesty and integrity. We set out to be brave, innovative, bold and passionate."

"I am proud to say that I kept my word, and the commitment I made to fully repay all debts came true ahead of schedule. In August 2014, the comprehensive settlement between myself, my investment company Novator, and the Icelandic and international creditors was successfully concluded. A total of 1,200 billion Icelandic krona had been paid, with 100 billion krona specifically allocated to Icelandic banks and their subsidiaries, marking the completion of the settlement process. It´s interesting that Icelandic banks had less than 10 per cent of the claims, because of the international nature of my business dealings."

"In Bulgaria, it was very different. I was highly visible and was viewed as a financier rather than an operational manager. My role was also ambassadorial and political. I knew all the main political players, drank tea with them and worked with them to let them know what was coming up. I felt like an investment king, doing everything from privatisations to leveraged buy-outs, and each success took that feeling to another level."

"We are all on the same gravy train though and I remember being acutely aware of that from the start. For ten years, I decided, life was going to be hard work, but then I was going to be extremely rich and have a life of luxury. I would live overseas, own my own plane and buy a yacht. I lived out that dream but it lost its appeal. When I spend more than a few days on a yacht, I quickly become bored. There’s great truth in the old saying in the yacht world that a boat owner has only two pure moments of happiness from it: on the day he buys the boat, and the day he sells it. The plane was great. I could go anywhere I wanted, but most of the time it took me to the next business meeting. Sitting on a yacht and lying on a beach are not really for me. I don’t see how a person with the ambition and drive to get there can ever switch off. I think of my brother-in-law, an artist who just grabs his guitar and writes a song when he feels like it. It’s all about doing what you want to do. I have always been a serial dealmaker, but it is not so easy to plan your next deal when the credit markets freeze and the heady tap of leverage is suddenly turned off."

"If this all sounds breathless and conducted at breakneck speed, that’s exactly how it was. A few years after first getting involved in Bulgaria, I employed 12,000 staff in telecoms and 4,000 in pharmaceuticals. I used the nation’s top investment bankers and owned some of its best real estate. But in Bulgaria I had a very different role from the one I had in Russia."

"When I was on the cover of *Forbes* magazine in 2005 Bulgaria’s media lapped it up. ‘Our Thor is On The List,’ ran the headlines. Their Thor? They had nobody of their own on the list, so they adopted me. I was an honorary Bulgarian. I was an outsider, but when it was positive news I was theirs. It felt good to be cherished. I felt that my time had come. However, high on the success of my pharma investments, I decided to copy the model in telecoms and try to repeat the Pharmaco story. I had bought a huge cash cow in the form of Bulgaria’s state telecom company, although it needed massive modernisation which we committed to by introducing fibre and mobile phone service. Now all I needed to do was reverse that company into a Scandinavian listed company with access to listed capital markets and use them to buy more telecom companies in the region (the East-to-West arbitrage). I wanted to do a copy-and-paste of what I had already done in Iceland, and I got the chance to try it in Finland. I managed to acquire the biggest single shareholding of the listed Finnish telecom Elisa, a conservative company more than 100 years old and the only Scandinavian telecom operator with no international assets. This was a no-brainer to me, and I thought the investors would welcome someone with a new vision of modernising their company and fully using its potential for scale with merger ideas and ready-made connections in eastern Europe. But that’s when I hit a wall."

"My investments in both Russia and Bulgaria supported jobs and investment in different ways. In Russia, it was certainly a question of making great profits, but the happy side effect was that there were thousands of jobs created. It was a great feeling to be able to employ people, knowing that the lives of their families were so much better as a result. Those jobs are still there."

"In the meantime, I had become involved in other privatisations. Almost by accident in 2003, shortly after I moved to London, I received a call from Advent International, a private equity group. ‘Thor,’ they said. ‘We know you from the brewery financing talks in Russia. We’ve watched what you did there and are kicking ourselves for not having invested but here’s another opportunity. We’re bidding on a privatisation of the major Bulgarian telecoms company BTC. We remember you were in a privatisation in the pharmaceutical industry in 1999 in Bulgaria. We’ve got another investment. Would you like to co-invest with us?’"

"I was under a lot of pressure as I had virtually all my personal capital tied up in the project, but it focused my mind on making sure that everything in our plan worked perfectly this time."

"We met with a lot of resistance from Delta’s chief executive who basically killed off the deal for shareholders in order to keep control himself. A couple of years later, I did a hostile takeover of that company by buying 51 per cent of it overnight from large shareholders and outmanoeuvring the CEO who then had to concede control and simply join our bigger group management. We had a lot of cash and started looking for an acquisition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia."

"Within a single decade in post-communist Russia, I had gone from having practically nothing to having millions of dollars in my bank account. However, if anyone had told me that I would be able to multiply this 40 times over the next six years, I would not only have asked what they were smoking, I would have wanted to know what planet they were living on."

"Crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin."

"It appealed to me partly because the bankers and the entrepreneurs were all itching to put their own money into this project. I immediately formed the view that this opportunity was one that came around not once in a generation, but once in a lifetime. I went back to Pharmaco, the listed Icelandic pharmaceutical company that originally sold us the machinery for the Russian bottling venture. I had my father talk to the boss as I thought I might have found something for us to take a look at together. Pharmaco had become an investment vehicle and was behaving like a conglomerate. It was cash-rich and making a lot of investments in Iceland, buying insurance companies, breweries and properties. It needed places to invest its cash. My idea was simple. I knew eastern Europe and Russia on the ground and could negotiate through the minefields. But I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals. Pharmaco knew everything about pharmaceuticals from the distribution end so I thought we should team up. And that’s what happened."

"This became more difficult when I made the move from business operator to investor. I started this diversification before selling my Russian operations, and in 2000 an investor road show was held for a deal that I was doing in Iceland. There was a morning meeting with Icelandic bankers and analysts and all the relevant business executives. We asked if there were any questions and after two minutes of silence, one of the analysts said: ‘Thor, how was the mafia in Russia?’ I had to spend time telling him that I really didn’t come into contact with it much. During my ten years in Russia, I reckon that the proportion of my time spent having to deal with mafia-related issues was less than 2 per cent. Nevertheless, it is not the sort of thing that twitchy lawyers, accountants, bankers and regulators want to have to think about when dealing with investments."

"Some investment bankers I’d met through fundraising for the Bravo venture came to me and said they knew two entrepreneurs of my age in Bulgaria who were having a hard time finding somebody to invest in their company. ‘It’s a privatisation,’ they said, and my ears pricked up. For me, eastern European privatisations meant the opportunity to make a substantial amount of money, and that is how it turned out."

"My view was that I had signed up for a tour of duty for up to ten years. I would do it and then go somewhere else and settle down. My friends were all getting married and having children, but that was not an option for me at that time. I was well aware of the ‘tender trap’, which was basically hooking up with a Russian woman who then became pregnant. I didn’t want to end up being somehow a part of Russia. It was always a case of going in, making money and coming out again. Of course, I still have an emotional tie to Russia because of my time there. But my motto was: ‘Never have anything in your life that you’re not ready to walk out on at five minutes’ notice. Be totally flexible, because the world can change in a minute.’ It sounds harsh, but it is how I operated."

"We parked two of them in the middle of the square and started selling cans of beer. We had the first canning line in Russia, so while competitors were making people queue to get foaming plastic glasses of beer, we could just pass out cool-looking cans. It was a hot summer’s day and we had our beer revolution. All the cans were bedecked in our logo. You couldn’t go 10 metres in St Petersburg without seeing our name. It was ambush marketing and it worked brilliantly. I still regard it as one of the best days of my life. I thought: ‘We are just small guys … just look at this … we’ve got to utilise our momentum to the max.’ At that stage only the first third of the factory was complete, but we pushed the other stages through quickly. Our products were everywhere in Russia. We were players in St Petersburg – a city of 5 million people. I bought my own apartment. It was great. When we got to 4.5 million hectolitres, we had the sixth-largest brewery in Europe."

"Go big – plan for the big time."

"We had just started on the first module when we realised that we would have to go immediately to stage two, so we started building that. All at once we were producing, marketing and selling a new beer, while constructing a new brewery and doubling and tripling production. We reinvested old capital into the business again and again. When we launched in St Petersburg in 1999, we were still a secret. Nobody knew what we were doing. We never spoke about our plans. In those internet-boom days everyone, it seemed, was making bold claims about changing the world. We were exactly the opposite. We didn’t want to attract attention. We just started selling our beer the same day we started production. It was real and out in the market. We called it the ‘submarine strategy’ and deliberately planned it that way to surprise our rivals."

"We looked into buying a brewery in Novgorod, the old capital of Russia, and renovating it, but seeing all the Soviet legacy problems, we said: ‘Let’s start afresh with a blank sheet of paper.’ This was precisely the right idea."

"We designed the Bravo brewery in a modular way that allowed us to quickly scale up production. I took advice from brewery experts in Denmark who told me that the typical mistake people make in designing breweries is that they do not allow themselves room to grow. So we started at a capacity of 1 million hectolitres, with a three-stage plan to take it to 2.5 million hectolitres and then 4.5 million hectolitres."

"It has been amazing to watch how this man has shaped Russia over the last quarter of a century. When he first appeared in the Kremlin with real power as prime minister in 1999, while I was living in Russia, he was just what the country needed. A disciplined leader with ambitions to turn Russia around from the downward economic and social spiral that his weak predecessor Boris Yeltsin had presided over while he was in power. Yeltsin was simply a raging alcoholic with a kleptocratic circle of oligarch advisers who were not working in either his or Russia’s best interests by any measure."

"out. I often think that the best lessons I learned in business were outside business school, which cannot teach you how to pitch or close a deal – these are things you have to learn in the field."

"Coming from the US, where everyone greeted me sweetly and asked how I was, it was a shock to arrive in Russia. If you asked a Russian how he was, you were likely to get the answer: ‘Better today than tomorrow.’ The Russians were a pessimistic bunch, used to hearing about grand three- or five-year plans without ever seeing anything getting better. So maybe it’s harsh to say that they were pessimists; perhaps they were just well-informed optimists."

"The advertising law in Iceland was very strict and you could not advertise alcohol. We needed something innovative, so I created a travelling beer festival. We did a lot of camouflaged advertising, obtained a lot of media coverage and sold a lot of beer. Then my father told me he was thinking of doing something really off the wall. He had sold the Pepsi franchise and was left with just the brewery, an old soft drinks factory and a non-compete clause that prohibited it from making soft drinks for sale in Iceland. He had met up with an old friend, Ingimar Haukur Ingimarsson, and they decided to set up a joint venture in Russia, which was just opening up to external capital. 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."

"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."

"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."

"After his stay in Bordeyri, Thor was hired by a merchant in Borgarnes on a decent wage. But he still kept his sheep and expanded further, buying land in Borgarfjordur and hiring a keeper. Within a short time, he became the town’s leading sheep farmer, again making his money from the export trade. After a dispute with the merchant who employed him, Thor borrowed money from Scottish traders he had got to know in Borgarnes and opened his own store in nearby Akranes, and at the same time continued to expand his sheep business. By not only investing his own funds but also taking loans to expand even further, he was as it turned out buying into a bubble."

"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."

"the question I always kept in mind in the debt bubble was: how much am I personally guaranteeing? That was a checkpoint for me. The answer, when the markets crashed, was that I had personal guarantees of €400 million. One of my advisers, a restructuring specialist, told me that this was the largest personal guarantee he had ever seen in a restructuring. After my father went bankrupt and his €250 million share of our joint guarantees was added to mine, the total rose to €650 million and the proportion of the balance sheet I was guaranteeing rose from 12 per cent to 20 per cent."

"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."

"I have always been interested in what I call special situations. I like to parachute into hairy situations, save them from getting worse, turn them around and make an exit. You could call it storm-riding financial markets. Such situations develop only when people are scared and do not understand the risks. I act like one of the advance guards who seeks to establish an entrenched advantage. I am not a mercenary. I am accountable. My personal reputation and wealth are at stake and my next deal depends on how I have entered and exited my last one. Publicly quoted corporations are normally not nimble or brave enough to put their balance sheets at risk in the same way that risk-taking individuals do. I can put myself on the line for what I am doing. People know who I am and what they see is what they get."

"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."

"What was it like to add $2 billion to my personal wealth in the space of just two years? It certainly wasn’t ‘easy come, easy go’, although that is how it might look now, but it was definitely rapid. I made my first $100 million in 2002, from the Bravo brewery sale to Heineken. In those years Pharmaco, later Actavis, a generic pharmaceutical business where I was the largest shareholder, had become a public company with a stock market capitalisation of about $50 million – so small that London investment bankers would barely give me the time of day. But Actavis grew phenomenally both organically and through mergers and acquisitions, and by 2008 it was valued at €5.3 billion ($7.3 billion dollars at the exchange rate of the time) and was Iceland’s biggest industrial company, second in size only to the banks on the nation’s stock exchange. Actavis, in all its guises, was my biggest, most profitable and most complicated investment. It sums up the way I like to do business. In its early days, it involved putting together an equity consortium in a privatisation in eastern Europe. Then there was a reverse takeover of a listed company, the spin-off of its core business, a hostile cross-border takeover of another listed company, a public-to-private leveraged buy-out, financial restructuring and finally a sale to a listed company."

"I had more money than I could have spent in a thousand years. *Forbes* estimated my wealth at $3.4 billion and put me on its cover. Steady increases in asset value kept adding to my fortune. It might just as well have been on autopilot. Doubts crept up on the periphery, but everything was moving too fast for me to process it clearly and objectively."

"Resilience is the key to not only surviving but prospering. Obstacles and challenges are simply a road to the next phase of progress for us, however painful they might be. I also share an ultimate irony with my ancestors regarding their and my own biggest failures: they all seemed like great ideas at the time."

"A decade and a half later, I made my first fortune amid the Khrushchev-era concrete apartment blocks of Russia’s hinterland following the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of communism. I made my money from alcopops and beer, funding growth through my credit card, bank and private equity borrowings and working all the hours I could. Calculating that there were large profits to be made for the first outsider to successfully launch a premium beer brand in newly capitalist Russia, I set up shop in the Wild East and built the nation’s biggest foreign-owned brewery start-up, selling out for hundreds of millions of dollars ten years later."

"I thrived on coping with the esoteric, the dangerous and the exotic in pursuit of a deal. From pharmaceuticals investments in Bulgaria at the time NATO was bombing Serbia to dismantling a top-heavy former nationalised telecoms giant in the Czech Republic, I discovered that a little capital and a lot of debt could multiply my initial wealth many times over. It peaked when I bought a Bulgarian telecoms group, BTC. My leverage on that deal was 95 per cent, meaning I only had to put up 5 per cent of the funds myself. I was hooked."

"Cattle die and kinsmen die, thyself too soon must die, but one thing never, I ween, will die, – fair fame of one who has earned. from Havamal, ‘The words of Odin’ (c. ad 900–1200; translated by Olive Bray)"

"Born into one of Iceland’s most famous capitalist families, I remember negotiating my earliest deal at the age of 10 when I persuaded my father to lend me $80 to buy a stack of vintage *Marvel* and *X-Men* comic books. I went into a 50–50 partnership with him. It was my idea and his money, which seemed to be a good notion at the time. I never paid him back, but the comics became a great investment. They have never been sold and are stored in a warehouse, accumulating value that will hopefully be passed on to my children."

"This way of thinking has become second nature to me. I don’t chase collapse for its own sake: I respect its dangers deeply. But I’ve learned to trust that in the ashes of old systems lie the building blocks of new success. It’s a mindset that has shaped my investments, my strategies and my outlook on life itself. Conversely and importantly, others have found opportunities in some of my failures, like in Colombia. That is the circular way of the world, and just as I can time my entry into failed projects of one kind or another, I too can fail. Often spectacularly so, but that crisis becomes the other side of the coin for another opportunity."

"We will be more risk conscious, but it irritates me when it is said that people like me need to operate much more like institutional investors because smaller players in the boom times were among the main protagonists of risk. This ignores the fact that the institutions were egging us on. When we said it might be risky they would say: ‘We trust you, we trust you. You figure it out but get us more risk and get us more results.’ It’s different with banks now, of course. When I say to them: ‘We can make a double-digit return here,’ they say: ‘We’re afraid that will fall through our risk profile.’ Instead of coaxing me to take more risk, my stakeholders are doing the opposite. We are talking about different stakeholders, of course. The ones who invested with me in the boom times did so because they knew I was a risk-taking special situations operator and they were of the same mindset, though they were one step removed. If anything went wrong, they could always blame it on me. Now it is the opposite. My stakeholders in Darwin wanted almost no risk at all – and I cannot blame them for that."

"That is history now and I’m glad to say that I have made good on my promises to repay my creditors and stick to the terms of the restructuring settlement that was reached in 2010 between myself, my investment company Novator, and all of our creditors. This agreement was projected to take approximately five to six years to fulfil, and an army of around 100 lawyers, accountants and other specialists worked tirelessly on it. The forensic accounting process was immense and spanned nearly a year and a half, and I am sure that such thorough practices were not employed in the cases involving others connected to the Icelandic banking system. As part of the settlement, I relinquished most of my personal assets, including various apartments and holiday houses, a private jet and a yacht. Moreover, I granted creditors complete access to all of my bank accounts to ensure that all my assets were on the table."

"This time is never different. We always come full circle back to the same point. I also believe the traditional banking model is fundamentally broken, as the rise of the ‘neobanks’ (the online internet banking apps) shows. I have been an active investor in those, making a handsome profit from Monzo and taking a longer-term outlook on US mortgage company [Better.com](http://Better.com), where I found myself at the crossroads of two powerful forces: a market high on tech euphoria, and a personal curiosity about a financial tool I had never used before – the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). My vehicle was named Aurora, alluding to my arctic roots, and was my first venture into this world. SPACs were everywhere, promising speed, flexibility and the chance to participate in what felt like the next chapter of innovation. This actually turned out to be two bubbles that would soon converge."

"I say to my people: ‘Try not to be in a hurry. Try to do something constructive and make sure you do it by the book.’ But at the back of my mind I’m keen to go back and see what can be tweaked and how I can improve on the deal I’ve got. My instincts are always to do something radical and unexpected – break up, spin off and then look for a truly transformational deal."

"I am not without fault here. There are a few things I should and could have done to make this less painful. The common wisdom was to get a ‘local partner’ to work with in a new country, and I could have taken in a partner at the beginning to share the gain and pain. That was certainly what the bankers advised, but my gut feeling was to build the first company there on our own. I had heard a lot of stories about local partners ripping off foreign investors in Latin America, and in my view that risk was too much to manage on top of the other straightforward business risks inherent in a start-up operation in any country, let alone one in an unfamiliar new place literally on the other side of the planet. But we did look for a partner for Colombia, because by that time we had our own experience and contacts in Latin America, and that was the plan for future countries where we could roll out the WOM concept."

"Partnership is becoming my strategy. After spending most of my career largely taking my own risks, the constraints of my Darwin agreement to pay back my banking creditors, coupled with my lower risk appetite (and hopefully with a wiser head on my shoulders), mean that I am now looking for opportunities to share. Previously I would spot an opportunity, do my research and conclude that it needed perhaps £500 million, which I would fund with, say, £50 million of my own capital, borrowing the remainder. That route is now closed, so in this scenario I would aim to put in £100 million and recruit four partners to contribute £100 million each. This sort of risk sharing is what the City of London was originally built on, and I think it is on the rise again. I have redefined my business model over the last decade, including my risk profile and geographical zones of opportunity. The tools that I had in the 1990s and mid-2000s – mainly the flood of leverage that allowed a different way of thinking about business opportunities – are no longer available, so I have had to adapt my approach."

"It was a relatively big deal for me in a new sector in a new region, but I hashed it out with the founder in a relatively short time. We created a convertible $250 million loan to him to buy out Anil Ambani, one of India’s best known and most powerful businessmen, who owned a 33 per cent stake through his Reliance MediaWorks company. This enabled Namit to secure a solid majority of well over 50 per cent of the company he headed. I had the option to convert the loan into a shareholding in the company at a later date, but I wanted to get to know both the company and the media sector much better over the following years before taking an equity risk. Eventually I ended up trading into equity as the due date approached, as I believed the company had much more growth potential in the future."

"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."

"A few years later, the Covid-19 pandemic affected our business much worse than we realised at the time, with the effects taking years to trickle down into the business performance and total investment costs. It was basically a knock-out blow, and both businesses required a total financial reboot to get back on their feet again. At the beginning of 2024, I exited both of my Latin American telecoms investments after being impacted by enormous headwinds. In Chile I secured a full exit at a substantial profit by not taking part in new equity injection by bondholders there. In Colombia I sold my majority holding for a large loss as part of a [Chapter 11](private://read/01kdksn7jhqrm0f2m3d6xxdngv/ch11.xhtml#ch11) capital restructuring. Nevertheless I regard both as successful examples of adventure capitalism in a continent that was entirely new to me. The investments did not end how I had planned, but I learned from the Icelandic crisis and this time decided to draw a line under them rather than wait for the situation to improve as I had done in Iceland. I had learned to recognise a crisis, and ending my involvement was the right thing to do."

"No. My return to adventure capitalism needed to bear the hallmarks and characteristics of my past ventures: a business opportunity in a sector like telecoms that I knew something about, but in a territory that constituted a great unknown and fed my curiosity for the new. Asia was enticing but too far away for me to make any meaningful inroads. Africa is going to be a major opportunity but, with all the ventures I looked at there, I decided it was too soon; the necessary infrastructure was simply not there yet. Then I travelled to Latin America and decided that this was a place where I could do business."

"For me, I had my freedom and reputation back, especially in the wider banking community. Bankers love nothing more than a troubled borrower who makes good on his promises and gets them repaid. Now it was time to start again from a fresh footing."