Jo Lunder, once dubbed the “wonderboy” of Telenor who later was arrrested on corruption charges, may still live up to his nickname. Newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) reports that Lunder is set to profit handsomely from his brief tenure at the Norwegian tech firm Evry.
Lunder spent just eight months serving as Evry’s chairman in 2015, from March until he was arrested in November on corruption charges tied to his much longer tenure at Telenor and its VimpelCom subsidiary. He resigned as Evry’s chairman after his arrest and has worked since to clear his name. Lunder vehemently denies having anything to do with the corruption to which VimpelCom has admitted, while Norway’s economic crimes unit Økokrim continues to investigate. Amsterdam-based VimpelCom has since changed its name to VEON but Lunder remains charged.
Evry, meanwhile, announced this week that it’s planning to re-list on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company was delisted when it was taken over by the British fund Apax Partners in 2015 but now wants to raise several billion kroner in new capital.
That can be lucrative for Lunder, reports DN, because he was able to buy shares in Evry along with its other top executives when they took it off the market. He reportedly bought shares worth around NOK 8 million at the time. They can suddenly be worth as much as NOK 77 million if the most optimistic projections for the new stocklisting pan out.
A new Evry listing will be among the biggest on the Oslo Stock Exchange in the past decade. DNB Markets has valued the company at between NOK 12 billion and 17 billion. The company has undergone an economic turnaround in recent years, after a spate of trouble with its online banking services, and returned to profitability last year. It also has a strong orderbook and currently ranks as the Nordic countries’ largest company offering IT services.
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
