Renaissance man

Stephen Jennings. Photo / Supplied

The Bolshevik Biscuit Factory seems an unlikely place to start the story of a Taranaki boy who became a billionaire.

But Stephen Jennings kick-started his way to wealth at the Moscow plant.

It was 1992 and Russia had just opened its doors to the world after 70 years of communism.

Jennings, then 32 and working for consultants Credit Suisse First Boston, went to Russia for a six-week job: to privatise Russia's first-ever company.

There were no street lights, no neon signs, just one or two restaurants.

"It felt," says Jennings, "like we were driving into a very dark place."

For the free-market economist and former New Zealand Treasury official, the disintegrating Soviet Union had shadows everywhere.

Communism had collapsed, and while Jennings was there to help get capitalism in place - "people literally didn't know what private ownership meant".

Jennings and his colleagues needed to find, then persuade, a guinea-pig enterprise to sell, not easy when entrepreneurship had long been viewed as a crime.

They had to organise buyers too: the method was "voucher privatisation", which involved issuing vouchers to Moscow's 12 million citizens to trade for shares in the factory.

There were no laws in place to facilitate the sale, says Jennings, so "during the day we'd draft a decree and send a note to the president (Boris Yeltsin) saying 'if you want to meet your target for six weeks you've got to pass this presidential decree"'.

The factory sold for less than $1 million. Jennings had seen a similar factory sold in Poland for more than $100 million.

He saw the profits to be made. He also saw the way the world was changing, and that there were not just more Bolshevik Biscuit Factories, but many more countries like Russia as well.

The six weeks in Russia turned into 16 years. The company Jennings founded, Renaissance Group, is a major player in Russian finance.

It has Russia's top brokerage, investments including the Ukraine's biggest land-holding and Russia's biggest forest estate, and a consumer finance arm with 12,000 employees that provides credit cards and personal loans.

Jennings is now on to his next challenge: Africa.

Some believe Jennings could be New Zealand's richest man. Last month, Forbes magazine put his stake in Renaissance Group at $5.2 billion, much higher than previous estimates of his wealth at $1.6 billion.