Could Swedish financier Gerard De Geer be bailing out of the booming Russian economy? Last month’s announcement that he and his partner, Martin Anderssen, were selling their 50 percent stake in Moscow investment bank Brunswick UBS back to UBS set off heated speculation to that effect. Maybe De Geer, who founded Swedish investment bank Enskilda Securities in the 1980s and advised Russian privatization czar Anatoly Chubais in the early 1990s, didn’t think the good times would last. Fueling the rumors: De Geer and Anderssen sold their stake in Khanty Mansiysk, Russia’s largest independent oil exploration company, last year.
De Geer, 56, denies that he’s defecting. “These deals do not signal a pullout,” insists the London-based private equity investor, whose father was Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow. “We are taking a lot of chips off the table in Russia, but come the closing of this latest deal, we will put much of the proceeds back, probably in what looks like a substantially undervalued stock market.”
He explains that both Brunswick and Khanty needed deeper pockets to develop further. UBS is paying a reported $200 million for the remainder of Brunswick, and Marathon Oil shelled out $290 million for Khanty. De Geer and Anderssen still own a Russian fund company with E200 million ($240 million) in assets, along with a property developer, a railcar leaser, a publisher and an oil field equipment leaser.
“I will invest as much as I possibly can in Russian ideas I believe in,” declares De Geer. “It’s a country with huge long-term promise.”
