from the hip

The Norwegian shipping magnate John Fedriksen is involved in a fight for control over the US oil rig company Pride. Self-made Norwegian shipping tycoon John Fredriksen has made another move in the rig market. His rig corporation, Seadrill, snatched up 10 percent in American competitor Pride.

Fredriksen is known as a tough businessman, and one of his specialties have been asset play. With the international market for oil rigs in the process of heating up, and with prices hitting record levels recently, this recent play from Fredriksen seems to make sense. But he is also building up an empire of companies worldwide, most of them involved in shipping and oil.

Houston-based Pride International, is worth about USD 6,8bn, while Seadrill has a market value of about USD 12,5 billion. Aftenposten (Norway) brings the following comment:

“Seadrill has had the ambition to become the world’s largest rig company,” said analyst Kjetil Bakken in Fondsfinance to E24.

“If they are successful in buying Pride, they’ve come further. A merged company would become the second largest in the world, ahead of Diamond and after Transocean,” said Bakken.

Reuters writes that Seadrill views the share purchase in Pride as a financial investment.

Seadrill declined to comment on whether the move was a step towards a takeover of Pride.

Shipowner John Fredriksen is publicly acclaimed as Norway’s richest man.

John Fredriksen who built up his own wealth from nothing, continues to dominate the top of the list of the richest Norwegians. He now has a net worth reported to be NOK 55.5 billion (USD 10 billion) by the magazine Kapital.

Fredriksen is 63 years old and proud of hailing from a working class neighbourhood on Oslo’s east side. Through his investment companies Hemen Holdings and Meisha, Fredriksen controls the companies Frontline and Golar LNG from his £100 million Chelsea home in London. He also has major interests in the oil rig operator SeaDrill, the fish farming company Marine Harvest and the dry bulk company Golden Ocean Group. Fredriksen also recently announced that he through acquisitions and options and secured 9,6% of the worlds largest shipholding company Overseas Shipholding Group. (Source: Wikipedia).

When I say publicly acclaimed, the reason is that actually he is no longer a Norwegian citizen. He’s officially a citizen of Cyprus, after turning in his Norwegian passport in protest over Norway’s tax system.

However, Norwegian media as well as Norwegian politicians like to talk as if he was still Norwegian. For the politicians that may be a way to pretend that all is well and fine and, thus, avoid having to face challenges to the taxsystem that has recently driven both him and several others of the richest men in Norway out of the country, into tax exile.

Billionaire Norwegian shipowner and businessman John Fredriksen has placed one of his twin daughters, Kathrine Fredriksen (see picture), on the board of his major stocklisted tanker firm Frontline Ltd. Her sister, Cecilie Fredriksen, already sits on the board of another Fredriksen-controlled company, the Oslo-based collection agency Aktiv Kapital.

“He’s a modern-day Onassis. The tanker king. He landed squarely in the sweet spot of the tanker cycle, with the largest fleet of ships.” In 2001 an article on Forbes.com described him as having “a tanker fleet bigger than anything Aristotle Onassis ever had.”

Simultaneously, John Fredriksen is seemingly launching a media campaign to promote his daughters in Norwegian media. While I don’t know this for sure, the articles presenting his beautiful daughters Kathrine and Cecilie has all the marks of a professional PR-campaign on them. They appear at roughly the same time in several papers each time, and the content is similar.

The two young ladies are presented as savvy business-women. While I think it is wonderful that John Fredriksen is teaching his daughters business, I think perhaps the PR firm may be overstating the case a little, perhaps in order to please Mr. Fredriksen. While they may be talented, they are still a little too young for the heroic role assigned in some of the articles.