At the turn of the year 1984/85 Proventus made an analysis of the investment company Skrinet. This analysis led to Proventus’ first acquiring a number of small holdings in the Company via the stock exchange and later deciding to issue a limited offer to shareholders in Skrinet.

The background to Proventus’ interest in Skrinet is as follows: The company’s share portfolio included a number of strategic holdings, among others, the operational subsidiary Securitas. In contrast to the situation in most other investment companies, there was no large majority shareholder in Skrinet. The company had, during a whole decade, been very active on the capital market, attracting considerable resources, and its financial capacity was valued at 1.2 billion SEK.

At the beginning of 1985 the climate was growing darker for this type of company. After having been valued well partly due to the share market’s over-confidence in the company‘s management and its business ideas, they where now experiencing a very unfavorable trend on the stock market. When Forsinvest AB, owned by Gustav Douglas, came in taking 6% of the share capital and 36% of the voting stock, the situation changed.

Proventus determined to issue a tender offer to the other shareholders to acquire no more than 6 million shares. It was deemed that Proventus would not thus become the dominating owner in terms of voting power, but that it would achieve the position of largest owner. In conjunction with the Skrinet purchase a very attractive financing solution was proposed: the issue of a debenture loan extending over five years, the first two years being interest-free. Since 5 840 000 shares were left in Proventus could issue almost nominally 600 m SEK of this debenture loan with a market value of 450 m SEK. The conditions of the loan were attractive both to Proventus and to the creditors. The acquisition gave Proventus considerable influence over the administration of Skrinet without having a negative effect on its previous resources.