Saxo boss Lars Seier Christensen opens Pandora’s box with jewellery startup investment
Saxo Bank’s chief exec Lars Seier Christensen has got chins wagging in the Danish press. The banking boss has made a personal investment into jewellery startup Endless Jewelry – a company run by well-known Danish entrepreneur Jesper Nielsen.
Nielsen made his name as a reseller of jewellery brand Pandora. He sold his Pandora distributorship for $270m (£160m) in 2010 and Christensen was hoping the entrepreneur would be able to repeat the success. “I’m not really interested in investments outside Saxo Bank, but I’ve been looking around for something to put some money into and the scalability of this company is impressive,” he told The Capitalist.
He’s also hoping to lower the cost of Christmas presents. “If I can get the ladies in my family to switch from Tiffany to this brand, it’d be good, it’s more of an affordable luxury,” he added. You never know, Lars…
■ Carl Icahn lived up to his name yesterday, posting a rather self-aggrandising blog on Yahoo finance, extolling the virtues of shareholder activism, well, particularly his own shareholder activism. “With exceptions, I believe that too many companies in this country are terribly run and there’s no system in place to hold the CEOs and Boards of these inadequately managed companies accountable,” his post goes. Who can stop this? Yes, you guessed it, activist shareholders. He even goes on to publish a graph showing how much money investors would have made if they’d put money into companies where Icahn has or had someone on the board. If anyone can do it, Icahn can.
■ The FTSE wasn’t the only thing going down at the London Stock Exchange yesterday. We couldn’t help but notice that the exchange’s website was down for a large portion of the day, too. When we enquired as to the reason behind the technology meltdown, we were told there was an issue with the company’s BT connection and the telecoms giant was looking into it. Luckily, given BT’s head office is only around a 100 yards away from the Stock Exchange, LSE’s tech team didn’t have far to walk if they wanted to complain in person.