OSLO: Norway’s $850bn sovereign wealth fund made mistakes when it bought shares in Formula One and may try to sell them, its chief executive said yesterday according to a report in business daily Dagens Naeringsliv.
Yngve Slyngstad said the fund may seek to offload the stake if corruption charges against its boss Bernie Ecclestone are not properly addressed.
Several parliamentarians questioned last week whether the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund should have taken a $1.6bn stake in the motor sport in May 2012 together with investors BlackRock and Waddell & Reed.
Their comments came after Dagens Naeringsliv questioned whether the fund had violated its mandate by making the deal.
The fund can only buy a stake in an unlisted company if it plans an initial public offering. After the deal was made, a planned Formula One IPO was cancelled.
“Yes, we made a mistake”, Slyngstad told Dagens Naeringsliv. “In retrospect, what is most unfortunate is what eventually has ended up in corruption charges.”
The fund should have been more open about the terms of the deal and was wrong to have signed confidentiality agreements given that the planned IPO was suspended, Slyngstad was quoted as saying.
In February a British judge found Ecclestone had paid bribes to a German banker as part of a “corrupt agreement” linked to the 2005 sale of a stake in Formula One. Ecclestone faces a bribery trial in Germany over the same deal. Ecclestone said after the British trial that he disagreed with the judge’s decision. Reuters
