Free The Black Path by Åsa Larsson Page B

charged, but that’s where things turned around; the social worker got him to start studying. He started at the Business School in Stockholm in 1984, and started speculating on the stock market while he was still studying. That’s when he got to know Inna Wattrang and her brother Diddi. Diddi and Mauri were on the same course. Mauri Kallis worked for a firm of stockbrokers for a while after he graduated, and during those two years his own share portfolio grew; he bought H & M early, sold Fermenta before the crash, one step ahead all the time. Then he left and devoted all his time to trading for himself. A hundred and ten percent high-risk projects, first of all trading in commodities, then more and more buying and selling concessions, both in oil and in mining.”
    “Concessions?” asked Anna-Maria.
    “You buy permission to drill for some natural resource, oil, gas, minerals. You might find something, but instead of starting a mine yourself, you sell the concession.”
    “So you could make a lot of money, but you could also lose a lot?” asked Sven-Erik.
    “Oh yes, you could lose everything. So you need to be a gambler if you’re going to do that kind of thing. And sometimes he really was way down. But Inna and Diddi Wattrang were already working for him at that time. They seem to have been the ones who attracted the finance for different projects.”
    “So it’s a question of getting somebody to go for it,” said Anna-Maria.
    “Exactly. The banks don’t lend money for this sort of thing, so you have to find investors who are willing to take a risk. And the Wattrangs seem to have been very good at that.”
    Rebecka went on:
    “But over the last three years they’ve hung on to some of the concessions in the company, and they’ve also bought a number of mines and started to work them. All the Swedish newspapers are writing about the leap from stocks and shares into mining as the big step, but I don’t agree. I think it’s a much bigger step to go from speculating in concessions to starting up mining operations, working on the industrial side…”
    “Perhaps he just wanted to take things a little easier,” suggested Anna-Maria. “Not to take such big risks.”
    “I don’t think so,” said Rebecka. “He hasn’t chosen to start up mines in easy locations. They’re in Indonesia, for example. Or Uganda. A while ago the media turned against just about every mining company that has interests in developing countries.”
    “Because…?”
    “Because…well, just about every reason you can think of! Because poor countries daren’t create environmental laws that might scare off foreign investors, so the water is poisoned and people get cancer and incurable liver diseases and so on. Because companies in countries like that cooperate with corrupt regimes; there might be a civil war going on, and they’re using the military against their own people.”
    “Was there anything in it?” asked Sven-Erik, who had a police officer’s built-in distrust of the media.
    “Definitely. Some of the companies in the Kallis group have ended up on various blacklists, with organizations like Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch. For several years Mauri Kallis was a pariah, and had no interests in Sweden. No investor was willing to risk being linked to him. But about a year ago things changed. A year ago he was on the cover of
Business Week
; the article was about mining. And shortly after that
Dagens Nyheter,
the daily paper, did a big profile on him.”
    “Why did things change?” asked Anna-Maria. “Had they mended their ways?”
    “I don’t think so. I think it’s just that…well, there are just too many companies with interests in these countries that are doing more or less the same thing. And if everybody’s dodgy, in the end nobody’s dodgy, somehow. And they get fed up with painting the same picture as well. All of a sudden they need to write about this incredibly successful, energetic entrepreneur.”
    “Just