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Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

Peter Halloran, founder of Pharos Financial Group, got into the untamed Russian financial market with the spirit of pioneers.

His first contact with Russia took place during the Russian privatization, a reform consisting in privatization of state-owned industrial assets that took place in the 1990s, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where private ownership of enterprises had been illegal for a long time (Wikipedia).

The reformers relied mostly on the mechanism of free voucher privatization, earlier implemented in Czechoslovakia, and on the nearly free transfer of shares to employees.

The vouchers, each corresponding to a share in the national wealth, were distributed equally among the population in 1992-1994. They could be exchanged for shares in the enterprises to be privatized. Most people, however, were not well-informed and/or were very poor and were quick to sell the vouchers for money. Most vouchers and hence most shares ended up acquired by the management of the enterprises.

As these vouchers became tradable, the team Peter Halloran worked with at the time, at CS First Boston in New York, developed a system to find them in quantity and trade them on an institutional level. “We were able to buy up over 10% of......................

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