Kreuger & Toll Byggnads AB

Kreuger & Toll was a company founded May 18, 1908 by the two Swedish engineers, Ivar Kreuger and Paul Toll, with Henrik Kreüger working as a consultant and chief engineer.

Early 1908, Ivar and his cousin Henrik Kreüger had planned to found a construction company that would work for the US company Trussed Concrete Steel Co. on the Swedish market, to represent its new building methods based on reinforced concrete. At the same time Henrik Kreüger had introduced Paul Toll to Ivar. It turned out that Ivar formed the company with Paul, who had several years of practical experience in the construction business as an engineer, and was later site manager for the Swedish construction company Kasper & Höglund AB.

The company was founded as a construction company with the name Kreuger & Toll May 18, 1908 by Ivar Kreuger and Paul Toll with a total start capital of 10,000 SEK. The company was set up with a 60/40% ownership (Ivar 60%) and a profit split 50/50 between Ivar and Paul. The original capital was raised by the banker Oscar Rydbeck that became Ivar's main bank contact and economic adviser all along until the so-called Kreuger crash in April 1932. On August 10, 1911 the company changed to AB with the registered name Kreuger & Toll AB.

In 1917 Kreuger & Toll AB was divided in two parts; (1) Kreuger & Toll Construction AB, run by Paul Toll and (2) the holding company Kreuger & Toll AB run by Ivar Kreuger. At the same time Swedish Match was founded. In parallel Kreuger started to invest in a number of industrial companies, mainly in the Swedish industry. In 1923 Kreuger founded the holding company IMCO (International Match Corporation) together with Lee, Higginson & Co. in New York City. IMCO handled the Kreuger match business in America, South America and other countries outside Europe.

During the year 1930, 64% of the entire trade on the Stockholm stock exchange was related to Kreuger companies, which also were involved in complicated international financial operations.

In April 1932, a month after Ivar Kreuger's suicide, most of the Kreuger empire went bankrupt as well as Ivar Kreuger himself, who left nothing behind for his family. All of Kreuger's personal belongings, including houses, boats, furniture, paintings, etc., was sold at several auctions in 1932. Kreuger & Toll Construction AB however survived, as this company did not belong to the holding company, although the financial connections between these companies was never fully clarified. The company changed its name to just Toll Construction AB. The company merged with another Swedish construction company in 1968. Swedish Match was reconstructed in 1936 with the help of government guaranteed loans that was repaid within a couple of years, but IMCO did not survive. The work with the bankruptcy took nine years, and was not completed until 1941. One of the reasons for the long investigation time was that the documentation was insufficient, transactions were difficult to follow and complex cross-ownerships between the companies that was almost impossible to straighten out. Ivar Kreuger also had made complex transactions that no one else except himself knew about. Only Kreuger had the full view of how the company was built up.

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Wikipedia