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How many were his creditors, how much they were owed will not be known for a long time. Ivar Kreuger's business life was known to only a handful of men. In making important transactions he usually revealed only part of the details to any one person. The main holdings of his companies are common knowledge, but it is certain that they also had many investments which have never been revealed. How much money he had, no one knew, not even himself. He said he did not care. Others said that next to Sir Basil Zaharoff he must have been, for a time at least, Europe's richest man.
Principal Kreuger company is Swedish Match—Svenska Tändsticks. It makes 66% of the world's matches, controlling 250 plants in 43 nations. In 1930 its earnings came to $13,000,000. This company's growth was due to Ivar Kreuger's efforts and its rise paralleled his own. Sweden's match industry began in the latter part of the 19th Century. Small factories sprang up all over the country. In 1903 a merger of many of the companies formed Vulcan Match Manufacturing Co. which began to force the smaller companies out. In 1907 Ivar Kreuger, then 27, arrived in Stockholm after several years spent in the U. S. as a construction engineer. (He built Syracuse University's Stadium.) He and Paul Toll formed Kreuger & Toll Co. to do engineering work, but in a few years the company's function had changed to a holding company for the expanding of Kreuger match interests.
Ivan Kreuger's father had a small match factory which was not making money. Young Kreuger saw that a merger with other independents was the solution. In 1913 he put through the deal which created United Swedish Match Factories Co. and four years later this firm merged with the Vulcan group, eliminating competition in the home market. The next years were spent in pushing exports, building factories abroad, forming alliances with competitors. One of these alliances was a sales agreement with Diamond Match Co. to cover safety matches in the U. S. When in 1930 a U. S. tariff was placed on safety matches Kreuger began acquiring factories in the U. S. Last year he bought Federal Match Corp. of Chicago.
Another alliance was with Bryant & May, Britain's leading match house. Bryant & May and Swedish were always friendly but in 1927 they united their interests in the British Empire by formation of British Match Corp. in which Swedish was given a 30% interest. Match-man Kreuger at the time was so well entrenched in India that he could afford to exclude that vast market from the Bryant & May deal. Swedish Match operates chiefly through subsidiaries. Of these the most important is International Match, a U. S. corporation which holds the bulk of Swedish Match's foreign interests and earned $20,000,000 in 1930.
Although by the early 1920's Swedish Match had a firm hold on the world's markets, Matchman Kreuger wished to make it impregnable. He saw an opportunity in the unsettled financial condition of most of the world, realizing that cash-poor nations would grant match monopolies in return for loans. The first loan was to Poland in 1925 and consisted of $6,000,000. Greece followed and then France offered a match monopoly for a loan of $75,000,000. This large financing was accomplished through the sale of $50.000,000 worth of International Match bonds in the U. S. and Ivar Kreuger's monopolizing got into