Word: wenner
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With a Viking's daring, blue-eyed Axel Wenner-Gren founded the Swedish-Electrolux Co. in 1919 and girdled the world with its subsidiaries. Before long, he also controlled the Swedish paper-pulp trust. He bought out Krupp's interest in Sweden's Bofors antiaircraft gun, and started a military airplane plant to make the things the guns shoot...
...when the U.S. and Britain put him on their economic black list (TIME, June 29, 1942). This shut him off from his Swedish empire, but he fortunately made an influential new friend, the late Maximino Avila Camacho, enormously rich and powerful brother of then-President Manuel Avila Camacho. Wenner-Gren also had some spare change with him, $1 or $2 million. With Maximino's help he put the money to work...
Telephones & Targets. Wenner-Gren's telephone deal was almost as involved as the financial matchwork conceived by his late countryman Ivar Kreuger. Since Sweden's tight currency controls will not let Wenner-Gren export more than 2,200 kroner ($600) a month, he had to make the deal through a swap...
...million Mexican Ericsson Co. was owned by Sweden Ericsson Co. Wenner-Gren got it by swapping some of his Swedish securities. With Mexican Ericsson, he got its 49% ownership of the rival Mexicana Telephone & Telegraph Co. The other 51% of Mexicana is owned by International Telephone & Telegraph Co. (see above). For that, Wenner-Gren agreed to pay I.T. & T. some $11 million, raised by selling other Swedish holdings and using U.S. dollars earned by his stock in Servel, Inc. (refrigerators) and Electrolux Corp. (vacuum cleaners...
Those who know Wenner-Gren did not expect him to remain a telephone king very long; he is well aware that such companies are easy targets for expropriation. But the deal helped him get part of his fortune out of Sweden. After he had done that, he could sell his holdings in the merged company, and use the cash to expand his less vulnerable Mexican ventures...