Jan Kulczyk, Poland’s wealthiest man, has had a good economic crisis. While some of his fellow billionaires in central Europe are struggling with heavy debts, the 59-year-old serial entrepreneur is flush with cash and planning investments at home and abroad.
This represents a remarkable turnround for Mr Kulczyk, who made his fortune in privatisations in the early 1990s during Poland’s tumultuous transition to a market economy. In recent years he had seemed adrift as he tried to build an international business empire not based on his most bankable asset: his deep knowledge of Poland and his excellent contacts with Polish business and government.
His best deal of last year came in the spring, in the depths of the crisis, when he exchanged his 28 per cent stake (worth about $1.1bn) in Kompania Piwowarska, Poland’s largest brewer, for a 3.8 per cent share in its parent company, SABMiller. As it recovered from the global recession, the South African brewer’s share price soared by more than 50 per cent.
“It was the optimal moment for the transaction,” says Mr Kulczyk, reclining on a plush white couch, embroidered in gold thread, in his enormous office in London’s posh Mayfair district.
Mr Kulczyk also showed excellent timing in his decision to sell off his shares in PKN Orlen, Poland’s main oil company, as well as his stakes in telecommunications and insurance before the crisis swamped the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
“I knew that something like this would happen,” he says of the crisis, rubbing his trademark facial stubble. “It was only a question of when and how deep.”
His Polish car importing company, Kulczyk Tradex, had a decent 2009, helped mainly by Germany’s car scrapping programme, which saw German dealers importing Volkswagen and Skoda cars from Poland to meet the rise in demand. In addition, Autostrada Wielkopolska, the infrastructure company controlled by Mr Kulczyk, finally gained approval for a €1.6bn ($2.2bn) project to build a 106km stretch of Poland’s main east-west highway.
Mr Kulczyk’s primary vehicle, Kulczyk Investments, also managed to exit from a $60m real estate investment in Dubai with a slight profit before the collapse of the emirate’s property market.
While many of his fellow Polish tycoons have been laid low by the crisis, Mr Kulczyk is again topping the lists as the richest Pole. With his bottom line much improved, Mr Kulczyk is trying to make a triumphant return to his home market,. He is hoping to buy a share, together with Libya’s Tamoil, of the state-owned Lotos Group, Poland’s second-largest oil company, which is being partially privatised this year.
“We would like to be a leading stakeholder,” says Dariusz Mioduski, the chief executive of Kulczyk Investments.
If the Kulczyk Investments bid succeeds against rival offers from PKN, as well as potential bidders from Russia to China, it would mark an astonishing return to government favour.
During the 2005-07 government of the rightwing Law and Justice party, Mr Kulczyk was used as an example of the unhealthy ties between business and politics.
He retreated to London after becoming embroiled in a 2005 probe by a parliamentary commission into a scandal at PKN, where he was a minority shareholder. Mr Kulczyk, who was accused of holding secret meetings with a former KGB spy, has always denied he acted inappropriately and the commission took no action against him.
Now, he is a strong devotee of free markets and of a minimum of government interference in the economy. “It’s finally normal,” he says. “You don’t need to have relations with the government to do business.”
As well as his bid for Lotos, Mr Kulczyk plans to float his oil exploration company, Kulczyk Oil Ventures, on the Warsaw Stock Exchange shortly.
He also has holdings in other oil exploration companies like Ophir Energy and Aurelian, and is hoping to buy Ukraine’s KUB-Gas.
His company is currently negotiating a contract to build an €2bn coal-fired power plant in Belarus. “We want to be the largest private player in this sector in this part of Europe,” says Mr Kulczyk.
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