The Match King, Ivar Kreuger
Ivar Kreuger was
born on the 2nd of
March 1880 in Kalmar , where his father and uncle owned the
local match factory .
Kreuger trained as a civil engineer and began his career in the
construction industry , where he was one of the first to make
concrete and prefabricated buildings .
In 1908 he founded together with a fellow student the
construction company Kreuger & Toll, which was the core of an
international group of industrial, commercial and financial
companies .
In 1917 he gathered the Swedish match industry in Svenska
Tändsticks Aktiebolaget ( STAB ), which in the early 1930s
accounted for 40 % of the world production of matches , while
partners was responsible for another 22% .
He was in a growing international lending activity and also
acquired significant shares in Swedish companies such as Stora
Kopparberg and SKF , like he had a majority stake in LM
Ericsson .
Kreugers position was at all impressive and attracted the
world's attention as the Match King .
The world's newspapers were filled with articles about the
Swedish tycoon , who at that time was considered the world's
richest man .
As the international recession intensified after the stock
market crash in New York in October 1929 Kreuger himself
had taken large bank loans in order to maintain the illusion of
a successful and profitable group.
On the way from a meeting in the United States in 1932
Kreuger had made a stop in Paris for here to meet with some
European banks, but on the morning of 12
March 1932 he was found dead in his hotel room , presumably shot
by suicide .
Kreugers large group cracked the same year and cost the
following year the Swedish Prime Minister CG
Ekmans resignation, when it emerged that he had received money
to his political parti from the Kreuger trust.
For several years after, the cleanup work progressed and there
was lot of demands on the acquisition of the Group's vital parts
.
The two major players in this was the Morgan family in the
United States and the Wallenberg family in Sweden, where the
latter was that in relation to the majority of the enterprises
were the ones who drew the longest straw .
