EP351 · Economy · first published 2025-09-16
The national bourgeois investment banker | Peter Fagernäs | Negotiator 351
Peter Fagernäs discusses his book Kansallisporvari Peter Fagernäs – Kuinka teiniradikaalista tuli miljonääri (Docendo) and four decades inside Finnish investment banking. The episode is unusual because the interviewer once worked for the guest: Fagernäs was Sami Miettinen's first real boss at Prospectus Oy. In the KOP–SYP merger the exchange-ratio negotiation was done by Fagernäs and Juha Mikkonen alone, share prices could not be used as the yardstick, and KOP's real estate had to be written down by 1.6 billion. The episode also covers Pentti Kouri, whom Fagernäs met at the IMF through Jorma Ollila and to whom he lost a student union election by two votes; Black Monday, which Fagernäs heard about from the only telephone on an island in the Bay of Bothnia; the Fortum options controversy and Mauri Pekkarinen's review of the book; and Conventum, Pohjola and Taaleri. It ends with two concrete proposals for Finland: a self-directed funded pension on the British model, and merging the pension companies' administration while decentralising their investing. Published 16 September 2025.
The national bourgeois investment banker | Peter Fagernäs
Summary: In episode 351 Sami Miettinen interviews Peter Fagernäs about his book Kansallisporvari Peter Fagernäs – Kuinka teiniradikaalista tuli miljonääri (Docendo) and four decades inside Finnish investment banking. It is at once a book interview, a life story, and an unusually direct account of how the KOP–SYP merger was actually done, who was really in Finnish banking in the 1980s and 1990s, and what Finland should now do differently. Published 16 September 2025.
The interviewer’s relationship to the guest. Miettinen introduces Fagernäs in the first second of the episode as my first real boss. Fagernäs ran Prospectus Oy, where Miettinen began his career, and they have known each other since. That explains the tone of the episode and the fact that the interviewer remembers some of the events himself — and it is worth knowing while reading.
A note on reading this. The article is curated from the episode’s transcript. The subtitle track is YouTube’s automatic captioning, de-rolled from 3,398 cues to 1,698; it is punctuated but mangles proper nouns badly, so quotations are kept short and names were verified separately. Much of the episode is recollection of the 1980s and 1990s and is marked as such. Timestamps refer to that transcript.
1. The book, and what was said about it
This is Fagernäs’s second book. The first was about his grandfather Uno Fagernäs, and he describes it plainly as practice:
That was a prelude, a rehearsal, a warm-up, that Uno Fagernäs book, and then we carried on with this one. (00:00)
Miettinen states the genre case immediately, and it is the episode’s implicit thesis: there are far too few investment bankers’ memoirs in Finland. He compares the book to the Wahlroos series and considers the genre underserved (00:45).
The controversy. The only public response came from Mauri Pekkarinen, and Fagernäs’s answer is blunt but specific: Pekkarinen had not read the book. Pekkarinen claimed Fagernäs does not discuss his own position, when the book devotes nearly a whole chapter to it — Fagernäs’s board made the first Russian investment. The second and larger point escaped Pekkarinen entirely (07:38):
If Fortum had got the permit for Loviisa 3, it probably would not have had the firepower left to buy Uniper.
Fagernäs recalls how the nuclear permits ended. There were three applicants — Fennovoima’s Hanhikivi (with E.ON behind it at the time), Olkiluoto 4, and Fortum’s Loviisa 3, which he says was essentially ready. Loviisa 3 did not get a permit. The other two did, and neither was ever built (08:24).
Fagernäs is amusedly honest about media tactics: if you want publicity for a book, poke Mauri a little and Mauri reacts immediately (11:27). Miettinen for his part pays Pekkarinen his own tribute — Finland has, he says, only one negotiator with his own verb, pekkaroida, and he is a sovereign master of pork-barrel politics (11:27).
2. From teenage radical to bourgeois
The book’s subtitle promises a teenage radical, and Fagernäs specifies what that meant: they were radicals inside the National Coalition Party, and the aim was to turn a stagnant opposition party into one fit to govern (04:00).
That required relations with Kekkonen, and he does not dress it up:
The road to government at that time ran through nothing but Kekkonen. And the Coalition Party traditionally had very poor relations, so there was quite enough work to do. (04:35)
Why he did not become a professional politician. Three reasons, listed without excuses: the voters did not choose him, his wife was against it, and finally his employer made giving up active politics a condition (03:50). But he adds the more honest reason too: business started to interest me a great deal more (05:21).
Miettinen makes an observation he thinks still holds: if you are an educated Coalition bourgeois and try to fraternise with the left flank, that is not a winning recipe inside your own movement (05:00).
Education. Fagernäs qualified as a lawyer but had also been admitted to the business school — he simply never got past registering, because politics took all his time. In hindsight he says outright that a business degree would have served better for what he went on to do (05:50).
Instead the United States gave him a lesson no degree would have. Fagernäs was on a Bankers Trust macro course just as Paul Volcker began using interest rates to brake inflation. The whole of US monetary policy changed during the two months he was there:
Suddenly, three weeks later, [the lecturer] comes and says: forget everything I have taught you so far, the entire market has just changed. (06:06)
That, he says, is where he understood the fundamentals of monetary policy — and saw as a young banker what open money and a market economy mean. Finland did not have that. We were very closed. (06:52)
3. KOP and SYP: a merger done by two people
This is the single most valuable passage in the episode, because it is a first-hand account of how the central transaction in Finnish banking history was actually calculated.
Miettinen asks it in astonishment: you did not use juniors for the merger calculations, you and Juha Mikkonen did the entire exchange-ratio negotiation between you. Fagernäs explains why:
It was the kind of transaction that was not breathed to anybody outside, other than Juha and me. (01:05)
The mechanics. The position was that KOP had the better earnings values and SYP the better balance-sheet values. Fagernäs’s account of the solution is technically interesting: by moving derivative items from the earnings side onto the balance sheet, the differences converged (01:32).
And here is the detail that makes the whole negotiation exceptional:
The funny thing in this whole negotiation was that we could not use share prices as the yardstick. That would have been easy. (02:17)
Instead every balance-sheet item in both banks had to be taken apart. So that property values would be measured on the same principle in both, Kansallispankki’s real estate had to be written down by 1.6 billion — which of course lowered KOP’s balance-sheet value (02:17).
Miettinen remembers his own part: he was involved in the rights issue that raised the money, and his impression was that by then the balance sheet had been put right for the share, while SYP was running slightly better on the earnings side (01:32).
A by-product. The merger also moved the investment banks: Prospectus was taken from the KOP side into Merita Corporate Finance, while the other side went to the mandate of Wahlroos’s Mandatum — a competitor in that situation (02:43).
And the question of the name. Fagernäs has a Swedish name but not a Finland-Swedish background. He was lifted onto Merita’s management team to represent Finland-Swedish values, and the reason was practical: Yhdyspankki’s key wealth-management clients were mostly Swedish-speaking, and Kansallispankki had no Swedish speakers to hand (03:03). Miettinen’s observation is sharp — the book is called Kansallisporvari, and Fagernäs is not characteristically a representative of the Swedish-speaking establishment.
4. Prospectus, and where this channel comes from
This section is personal, and it is worth reading as background to the channel itself.
Miettinen’s own start. He wrote his master’s thesis on management option loans on the Alexander Corporate Finance side, and the topic came from Timo Löyttyniemi — who taught a valuation course at the business school and recruited Miettinen into Prospectus when he was the course’s keenest swot (10:30).
Fagernäs’s description of who was in the building explains why Prospectus is still discussed:
We got to pick the best people in the bank. You rarely get an opportunity like that. (10:41)
Miettinen lists them: Timo Löyttyniemi, Eeva Ahdekivi, Jukka Ruuska and others — extremely strong finance people at Prospectus. That was the leading group. He mentions having gone to look at the old premises on Pohjoisesplanadi and calls it a nostalgic moment (10:41).
And what he took with him. This is the episode’s most entertaining professional confession. The partners had rolodexes full of investment bankers’ cards, and Miettinen had what he calls a kingly idea — that a few of them could be copied. The contacts led to several offers from London (25:52). Later he was at Credit Suisse First Boston, the same house where Pentti Kouri had been a banker (27:23).
Miettinen also mentions losing a Bankers Trust interview in New York: the derivatives specialist post went to some Indian genius, and he admits to having been a little bitter (23:37).
The continuity is direct: Miettinen is at Translink Corporate Finance, still an investment banker, doing technology deals (17:32).
5. London, New York, Stockholm
Fagernäs built three overseas units, and he regards that as the best part of his career. His reasoning is memorable:
They were all, in a sense, founded by me, and the fun in that is that you cannot look elsewhere for someone to blame. You have to go and stand in front of the mirror if it does not work. (12:12)
London, 1984. The family was meant to stay five years; they stayed barely two, because the idea of an office in America emerged (12:58).
New York — the favourite. It coincided with the Reagan years, and Fagernäs describes the market as a real spirit, in which they did not join everything but found their own niche (12:58). Three successes stand out:
- Mobile operators. The United States was behind Finland in mobile telephony, but Fagernäs’s team believed in the market. Since radio frequencies are a scarce resource, each state got two frequency bands — and a client from the London years turned a cable television business into a mobile telephone business and began acquiring licences state by state. KOP was its house bank for a long time, until the company grew so large that the big Canadian and American banks had to be called in (14:30).
- Energy. The capability came from the London office, which had an energy team. On that basis one of America’s best specialists in alternative energy volunteered to do the work for Kansallispankki in the US (15:15).
- Small telecoms. They had no collateral, so a hybrid was invented: warrants combined with a bank loan, letting the bank share in the companies’ own growth. Fagernäs considers this one reason the New York office did so well (16:01).
Black Monday. Fagernäs happened to be fishing in the Bay of Bothnia. He booked a call from the island’s only telephone to his head of currency to ask whether the office was still standing (23:37). The outcome was the opposite of the fear: as a commercial bank they had no equity position at all, but they did have a bond position — and when the central bank cut rates to prevent a larger catastrophe, bond prices moved their way. The department’s result was made in a single night, and there was no longer any hurry back to New York (24:22).
Stockholm — bomb disposal. He did not want to go, but the order came. He corrects Miettinen’s assumption that the Swedes were sold something above value: they got their own investment money back, but had to guarantee some of the bad loans. The stroke of luck came later — as owners of the Gota group, Proventus sold it to SPP and Trygg-Hansa a year before the Swedish banking crisis (25:07).
The Nordic associate-bank phase. That was necessary, Fagernäs says, because they had neither the people nor, he suspects, any chance of permits from the Finnish authorities. The first wholly owned subsidiary bank abroad was Luxembourg in 1977. The cooperation frayed when Handelsbanken began founding its own units and became a competitor — the network broke up one by one as everyone put in their own offices (16:46).
6. Pentti Kouri
The most interesting portrait in the episode is not of the guest.
How they met. Fagernäs was an ASLA scholar in the United States in the early 1970s, and Jorma Ollila took him to the IMF, where Kouri was a young economics prodigy. Ollila wanted to introduce another Atlantic College boy (26:38). They found each other again in 1978 in the fourth company of the reserve officer school, where they stood against each other for chair of the student union — Kouri won by two votes (26:38). And a third time in the New York market, where Kouri was a First Boston banker and met George Soros (27:23).
Fagernäs’s assessment. It is unusually direct:
If he had stayed on the academic path, we might have two Nobel laureates in economics. (28:09)
He adds that Mario Draghi was a great admirer of Kouri, and that the Bank of Finland once held a Kouri seminar with Draghi as keynote speaker (28:09).
What Kouri is known for. Miettinen describes Kouri’s work on exchange-rate overshooting, drawing a parallel with Soros’s reflexivity (27:23). For precision: Kouri took his doctorate at MIT in 1974 and was a professor at Stanford, Yale, Helsinki and New York, and his portfolio-and-current-account approach was one of three significant new views in the economics of exchange rates, alongside Rudiger Dornbusch’s overshooting model — in Kouri’s 1976 version the slow-moving variable is national wealth, adjusting gradually through the current account. The episode presents these as a single Kouri–Dornbusch model, which is a compression rather than an accurate description.
And what Kouri was connected to. The Kouri deals arose, in Fagernäs’s account, from complete distrust between the banks — they could hardly talk to each other about anything. It began with the Hop takeover (28:54). Kari Nars was Hop’s CEO, and the bank fell on a large dollar position he had taken speculatively (29:10). Miettinen does not hold back: Nars’s talk of the markka as a junk currency was in his view harmful, and his exchange-rate theories are not of Kouri’s level.
Miettinen attaches his own view, the episode’s clearest macro position: a floating exchange rate in Kouri’s overshooting sense is part of why Sweden and Poland have done rather well, unlike the rigid euro countries that have not adjusted (29:41).
7. Nalle, and who drew himself into the wrong box
Fagernäs treats Wahlroos generously, which Miettinen notices — he had expected some needling (31:11). Fagernäs does make two corrections.
The first concerns Wärtsilä and Prospectus: Wahlroos’s recollection of certain phone calls does not, according to Fagernäs, hold (31:11).
The second is larger. Wahlroos implies in his book that he was involved in the Rauma–Valmet arrangement. According to Fagernäs, Prospectus happened to be advising both sides, and Mandatum was nowhere to be seen. He quotes Tauno Matomäki:
Nalle draws himself into the wrong box. (31:11)
Miettinen generalises it into a habit of the trade, which is honest about his own profession too: investment bankers sometimes inflate their role — do a fairness opinion, and suddenly you were the lead negotiator (31:57).
8. Options, and what their disappearance cost
The Fortum years produced Finland’s best-known options controversy, and Fagernäs goes through it in figures. The company’s market value was 26 billion, of which the state’s share was 13 billion; a billion a year was paid in dividends, of which the state’s share was 500 million. Yet the debate centred on the fact that the share incentive scheme’s more than 300 participants got rich — that was the bad news (09:10).
The remark he remembers making to Pekkarinen is the episode’s driest:
Mauri said he was having nightmares about Fortum’s share price rising, and I said to him: listen, I can get it down in a few minutes, but getting it up is much harder. (09:56)
A technical clarification usually forgotten: Fortum first had option loans, and Mikael Lilius converted them into a share incentive scheme — so the controversy was about share incentives, not options (33:28).
And from this Fagernäs draws the episode’s best lesson about instruments. The question is not which is more moral but what the owner wants:
| Option | Share award | |
|---|---|---|
| Encourages | risk-taking and faster growth | staying with the company |
| Character | aggressive | calmer, with long tails |
| Suits when | aggressive growth is wanted | management should be tied in long term |
If you want aggressive growth, then an option is not a bad model for rewarding management, because the option tempts you to take more risk. (33:28)
The consequence. After the controversies there were effectively no options, and in Miettinen’s view risk-taking and growth fell afterwards. He raises an episode recorded with Riku Asikainen and the working group appointed by Riikka Purra to design a compensation system for Finland — and considers this the chance of a century to bring options back (34:13).
On tax both agree, and Miettinen’s formulation is precise: you cannot be taxed on income you do not even have and which is entirely speculative (34:58). On top of that, employer social costs make the exercise of options a large cost to the company. Fagernäs’s summary: capital-income options could simply be brought back.
9. Conventum, Pohjola, Taaleri
Conventum. It began as a corporate finance house of a few people, and then did a three-way merger with the Arctos brokerage and Arctos Capital. With it came a growth- and small-company portfolio that was in effect a venture capital portfolio, almost entirely technology companies (36:29). One of them later became Revenio — and Fagernäs is careful here: it was not that in our time; it became that later (37:14).
The private equity market that went to Sweden. This is the episode’s sharpest observation about Finnish capital markets. Fagernäs was involved in choosing Ari Tolppanen as CEO when CapMan was founded, and Industri Kapital’s Konecranes deal was the first large private equity operation in Finland (38:46). But:
The Swedes took the private equity market entirely for themselves, and although we would have had the opportunity, our institutional investors did not believe this could be done in Finland, so they took their money elsewhere. (38:01)
Pohjola. At the turn of the millennium the wealth management unit had been built — with Vesa Puttonen and Mika Heikkilä — but there was no distribution network. From that came the idea of joining forces with Pohjola, and Fagernäs opened the discussion with Eero Heliövaara (39:31).
A minority-shareholder fight followed over the merger with the cooperative bank. Fagernäs’s analysis is interesting because he concedes the asymmetry: the price was considered too low, and the main owners — Suomi and Ilmarinen — got the distribution network, which was of enormous value particularly to Ilmarinen. Minority shareholders did not get that benefit in proportion (41:03). Miettinen adds that Suomi had been in a catastrophic state before and in his view got an undeserved jackpot.
Of the book Marko Junkkari wrote on the subject, Fagernäs says: it is well made, though the last thirty pages are a little bit Heliövaara’s show (40:17).
Taaleri. The timing of its founding was, in his own words, as bad as possible — the last year of the boom, and it ended as if against a wall when Lehman collapsed (43:23). The starting point was that Sampo sold its bank to the Danes, Juhani Elomaa did not want to continue with the new owners, and around fifty people were leaving Sampo’s Private Bank side (43:23). Fagernäs was approached as an investor. He is satisfied with the outcome: roughly four billion in AUM, a good brand and a good spirit.
And here Miettinen describes his own part. When the company listed, a staff minority in the private equity subsidiary had to be bought out and exchanged into shares. Miettinen produced the fairness opinion — and built a Monte Carlo simulation for it: the investments were analysed from wind power onwards in good and bad scenarios, a probability-weighted discount was applied, and the shareholders’ agreement was read (44:09–44:56). Fagernäs confirms the collaboration and the reason: he was chairman, and Elomaa could not act in his own matter.
Wind power. Taaleri’s structure was, in Miettinen’s account, unique: not a fund but a deal-by-deal basket that investors joined at the level of individual projects; the first genuine wind fund came only later (45:41). Fagernäs remembers the reception:
Everybody laughed at us about this wind power when we came first with the idea. Nobody is laughing now. (45:41)
On state support he draws a line that is central to his politics: he is no fan of subsidies, but if something has to be set in motion, at that point support can fit — but the state should never itself become the entrepreneur (46:27).
Aktia. Elomaa sold the wealth management business to Aktia, and on that Fagernäs is unambiguous: in my view that did not go well. Aktia had a brilliant opportunity, but he doubts it grasped what a nugget of gold it had received (47:12).
10. Family, and where the bourgeois comes from
Uno Fagernäs. The grandfather was a general and the father attended cadet school; Peter is the first generation not to be professional soldiers (19:49). At the start of the Continuation War, the Munsala communists in his grandfather’s division refused to join an offensive war into East Karelia. The grandfather decided to lead by example: he ordered a German tank to the front and, for good measure, put his son — Peter’s father, who happened to be in his division — on top of it. In the melee his grandfather’s field cap was shot off his head (19:49).
The father’s later comment is the episode’s most human moment:
Of course it felt terrible, but can you tell your colonel father that you are not taking part in this? (20:35)
Jaakko Pöyry. The husband of Fagernäs’s mother’s sister from her first marriage; the children of that marriage are his cousins. Pöyry called him Pekkuli all his life and acted as his tutor to the extent that he flew from Brazil to Finland via New York in order to have lunch and talk about bank matters (18:18). Pöyry’s rule for getting on in business was four words, and Fagernäs stresses that the order matters:
Will, skill, knowledge and luck. (18:18)
Lohja. About twenty years ago Fagernäs bought the largest farm on eastern Lohjansaari. He calls it a banker’s playground and justifies it as a counterweight: he is a city boy who has lived most of his life in central Helsinki (22:52).
11. What Finland should do
In the closing section two market-economy bourgeois offer recommendations, and Fagernäs’s list is concrete.
Growth before savings. His diagnosis: we have been stamping in place for seventeen years — costs have grown, revenues have gone nowhere. Both sides must be dealt with, but saving is not a business, and the debt burden is handled primarily through growth (51:46).
Tax and attitude. The state must use bolder tax decisions to encourage work and entrepreneurship, and Fagernäs uses the phrase that is the spirit of his book: we should accept healthy greed, because combined with risk-taking it is what produces results in business (52:31).
Social security. In his view nobody has command of the present system, because it is a patchwork quilt to which new patches have always been added — change one point and there are knock-on effects everywhere. His proposal is a basic income, with the rest left to people themselves (53:16).
Owners, not management. Asked who should be prodded into motion, Fagernäs is clear: owners must set more aggressive targets and demand growth rather than dividends.
What is the sense in putting money into a company and hoping to get it back as dividends? That creates no added value at all. (54:02)
Miettinen attaches the Swedish comparison: Sweden did not consolidate its banking sector, it still has spheres of the Wallenberg kind, and because there is no gift or inheritance tax there are also enormous family office holdings. Fagernäs concedes the difference in starting point — Sweden has been wealthier since the seventeenth century — but adds the observation that is most interesting here: Sweden has had far cleverer social democrats, who in the 1970s and 1980s changed the whole of capitalism there and brought capital back by abolishing inheritance tax (55:35).
Two pension proposals
Nobody, according to Fagernäs, has yet taken these up, and they are the episode’s most concrete contribution.
1. Merge the administration, decentralise the investing. The pension insurers’ administration is currently triplicated; it should be merged — but the investing should be decentralised at the same time, to create competition (56:21).
2. A self-directed funded pension. Fagernäs’s own model comes from his own experience: from thirteen years in Britain he has a funded pension that he has been allowed to invest himself, and the returns have been better than the Finnish cluster’s (57:06).
Miettinen’s version is more specific: take about 10 per cent of the earnings-related pension contribution, that is 2.5 percentage points, which one could direct oneself — either into a locked portion of an equity savings account or into a dedicated channel where the pension company offers approved funds — released at a politically determined pension age (57:52).
Fagernäs adds a systemic criticism: the entire pension system has been handed to the labour market parties to think about, and nothing will come of it, because reform would break their power. It should be given back to political decision-makers (58:37). Miettinen considers the self-employed pension reform particularly badly done.
Fagernäs says he put these to Risto Murto and was told he would be served worse cognac next time — I said thank you for the invitation, and secondly, I don’t drink cognac (56:21).
12. From a closed banking sector to a market economy
Fagernäs’s own summary is the episode’s best passage, because it makes the scale visible:
When I came to work in a bank, we lived in a completely closed banking economy — you had to apply to the Bank of Finland for a permit even for a small currency transaction or to move money across the border. (49:28)
And there was a companies act under which a company in which foreigners owned more than 20 per cent was called a dangerous company (50:13). The move towards the European Community in the 1980s forced the markets open; there were excesses, and nobody really knew how — and Fagernäs suspects that those who had been in America and Britain knew a little better than the practitioners of traditional banking (50:13).
Everything changed completely on that journey, and the banks I myself worked in do not even exist any more. (51:00)
Both end on the same worry about the young. Miettinen recalls that in finance at the business school people competed to get at least to London; that, he says, has disappeared. Fagernäs agrees:
This drive is missing everywhere in this country, and I do not understand how we have become so limp. (51:00)
A note on the source
Transcript quality. The episode was captioned automatically by YouTube and de-rolled from 3,398 cues to 1,698. It is punctuated but mangles proper nouns unusually heavily, because the episode contains dozens of names. Corrections were made against the corpus and public sources: Löytyniemi → Löyttyniemi, Couri Dormush → Kouri–Dornbusch, Greg McCot / Mccohon → Craig McCaw, Tane Matomäki → Tauno Matomäki, Mike Lilius → Mikael Lilius, Heliaara → Heliövaara, Ermitaas → Hermitage, Rava Valmet → Rauma–Valmet. Quotations are kept short.
Names not given. A few people mentioned in the episode were left too unclear by the captioning to reconstruct reliably: a third finance specialist at Prospectus, the New York energy specialist, and two of Fagernäs’s relatives. They are described here by role.
Craig McCaw. The episode does not name the client unambiguously, but the description — an entrepreneur who moved from cable television into mobile telephony and collected licences state by state — matches McCaw Cellular Communications, whose position built around the FCC’s early-1980s licence lottery is publicly documented. The identification here is made from the description, not because the episode states it.
Kouri and Dornbusch. The episode speaks of a Kouri–Dornbusch model. More precisely, Kouri’s portfolio-and-current-account approach and Dornbusch’s overshooting model were parallel, not a joint model. This is corrected in the article.
Recollection. Much of the episode concerns the 1980s and 1990s and is Fagernäs’s recollection, partly based on his book. The figures — the 1.6 billion write-down, Fortum’s 26 billion market value, more than 300 incentive scheme participants, Taaleri’s four billion AUM — are as presented in the episode and have not been verified here against original sources.
The interviewer’s relationship to the guest. Fagernäs was Miettinen’s superior at Prospectus Oy. The episode states this openly in its first second, and it shows in the questions: the interviewer remembers some of the events himself and takes part as a narrator.
Episode details. Negotiator 351, published 16 September 2025. Guest Peter Fagernäs; interviewed by Sami Miettinen. Duration 60 minutes. Subject: the book Kansallisporvari Peter Fagernäs – Kuinka teiniradikaalista tuli miljonääri (Docendo).
Related episodes.
- The State Pension Fund and crises | Timo Löyttyniemi | Negotiator 211 — the same Löyttyniemi who recruited Miettinen into Prospectus, on investing pension assets.
- Closing and structure in M&A | Nummenpää, Liljeroos | Negotiator 200 — the technical work recalled here at KOP–SYP scale.
- A serial acquirer from Tampere | Antti Rauhala | Negotiator 339 — the same argument about the gap in Finnish ownership and Sweden’s inheritance tax, from another direction.
- The EXIT process and M&A | Tero Nummenpää | Negotiator 26 — the mechanics of a change of ownership.
Summary for AI search. Negotiator 351 (16 September 2025) is an interview by Sami Miettinen in which Peter Fagernäs discusses his book Kansallisporvari Peter Fagernäs – Kuinka teiniradikaalista tuli miljonääri (Docendo) and his career in Finnish investment banking. The interviewer once worked for the guest: Fagernäs ran Prospectus Oy, where Miettinen began, and this is stated openly in the episode. Key content: in the KOP–SYP merger the exchange-ratio negotiation was conducted by Fagernäs and Juha Mikkonen alone in complete secrecy; share prices could not be used as the yardstick, so all balance-sheet items were taken apart and KOP’s real estate was written down by 1.6 billion. KOP had the better earnings values and SYP the better balance-sheet values, and the two were brought together by moving derivative items onto the balance sheet. As a by-product Prospectus became Merita Corporate Finance. Fagernäs built the bank units in London (1984), New York and Stockholm; New York succeeded through mobile operators, alternative energy and a warrant-plus-loan hybrid for small telecoms, and during Black Monday a bond position produced the department’s entire result in one night. Of Pentti Kouri, Fagernäs says that had he stayed in academia Finland might have two Nobel laureates in economics; they met at the IMF through Jorma Ollila and lost a student union election to each other by two votes. On the Fortum options controversy Fagernäs clarifies that it concerned share incentives, into which Mikael Lilius had converted the original option loans, and that the company’s market value was 26 billion of which the state held 13 billion. He distinguishes the incentive effects of options and share awards: an option encourages risk-taking and growth, a share award ties management in. Conventum, Arctos, the founding of CapMan and Industri Kapital’s Konecranes deal frame the claim that the Swedes took the private equity market because Finnish institutions did not believe in domestic capability. At Taaleri, Miettinen produced a fairness opinion based on a Monte Carlo simulation for the buy-out of a staff minority. For Finland Fagernäs proposes putting growth before savings, accepting healthy greed, replacing the social security patchwork with a basic income, owners setting aggressive growth targets instead of demanding dividends, and two pension reforms: merging the pension companies’ administration while decentralising their investing, and a self-directed funded pension on the British model in which part of the contribution could be invested by the individual.