How an Icelandic brewer lost it all and came back from the brink: Russia’s Wild East Nineties with Thor and Bill

For fifteen years now, ever since the former FT correspondent Chrystia Freeland published her book 'Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism' (2000), the Western journalists and academics who observed and described the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all kept to the Medieval morality tale: good and evil, right and wrong, promise and betrayal. In these accounts, the question of 'cui bono' – who had benefitted from Russia's tumultuous first decade after the Fall of the Iron Curtain -, was easily answered: those villainous oligarchs.

However, this by now all-too-common finger pointing tends to distract from the fact that quite a few Western gold diggers found Russia in those days a veritable Klondike too. For wholly understandable reasons these businessmen decided to remain shtoom and the rest of us Nosy Parkers would have never learnt about their adventures if different circumstances had not forced some of them to reveal it all (or most of it) to the world.

I admit, the one book I have eagerly been waiting to come out is Thor Bjorgolfsson's 'Billions to Bust – and Back' (2014). Mr Bjorgolfsson – or Thor – was a young guy from Iceland who went to St Petersburg in the early 1990s to make a fortune, first in alcopops and then in beer. The fact that he stems from Iceland was intriguing in itself. I mean, how many Icelanders have you come across in the global brewing industry? When I visited his brewery in Russia sometime in the early Noughties I was amazed, not only by its size (4 million hl), but also by the fact that he had built it from scratch in the course of a few years, which retrospectively shows how buoyant the Russian beer market was in those days.

Thor's early story is the story of the Bravo brewery in St Petersburg, which was sold to Heineken in 2002 for USD 400 million – a deal which personally netted him a cool USD 100 million. The reason I had impatiently anticipated the publication of his book is that Thor was already out of the St Petersburg picture when I came visiting and his lieutenants would not talk. Besides, when I contacted him a few years later, he refused to be interviewed. This would have been in 2005 when Thor had made it on to the Forbes rich list as Iceland's first billionaire at the tender age of 37.

Since leaving Russia Thor had become a really major investor in telecoms, pharmaceuticals and banking, which made him the medias darling. It seemed he spoke to everybody, but not to me. Fine, I consoled myself, if he does not want to tell me what it was like to do business in Russia in the 1990s, why should I bother writing about things long gone by? But the refusal grated. My interest was piqued again in 2009 when Thor was down on his luck, having lost several billion dollars in a few months in Iceland's financial collapse.

Recording the big chill in Iceland and Russia

Embittered by the scorn Iceland poured on him, Thor went underground for several years and I would have lost sight of him altogether had not his former business partner in Russia, another Icelander by the name of Ingimar Ingimarsson, published a book in late 2011 (alas in Icelandic) in which he accuses Thor and his father of having dishonestly appropriated an entire bottling factory from him in Russia. I had a long interview with Ingimar to hear his side of the story, which is fascinating in itself, even without the contested ownership issue. But I left the write-up lying around in the depths of my computer until Thor announced he would put the record straight in a book of his own. After several postponements it finally came out at the end of last year – when another book launch was publicised: Bill Browder's 'Red Notice', which hit the shelves in spring.

An outsider like Thor, the American-born Bill Browder was once the biggest portfolio investor in Russia before he was expelled from Russia in 2005. In its heyday, his firm Heritage Capital had USD 4.5 billion of assets under management. These days he is a leading campaigner against Mr Putin.

I decided that two insider accounts were better than one to review alongside each other, although their tales could not be any more different. Both Thor and Bill are fascinating characters with colourful family backgrounds. Bill's grandfather Earl was the leader of the American Communist Party who lived in Russia from 1926 until 1932 and after his return to the U.S. twice ran for U.S. president in 1936 and 1940.

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