petrol head

JLR - Sir Ralph's Package

Recommended Posts

9 hours ago, oldmarcus said:

 

Yes, that sort of fraud and thieving began when the Russians began to 'get their legs', rather later into the 90's ; I started as soon after the wall came down and as I could begin to figure out the logistics of it all and was up and running by Spring/Summer 1992. The issue then was paying not to have your lorry/s kidnapped - in Russia, you always have to know/pay the right people, I was lucky to make friends with a well connected lady lawyer, she could get anything sorted in St Petersburg.

The profitability slowly got less and less and eventually, as said, they did it themselves, but I kept a exporting timber business until about 2007, then margins got bad on that, so I quit and sold the entire business except for keeping the office building, as it's in Riga City centre. I did most trade in Latvia & the other 2 Baltic states, I have no desire to go back to Russia - ever.

That was pretty fortuitous really, as I sunk the money into USD at 2:1, plus managed to miss the 2008/9 crash during very long periods at the holiday house doing very little, I was totally exhausted after almost 15 years constant traveling by then TBH, plus I missed much of my kids growing up - but these chances don't happen often and at least they got a great private education which is more than I ever did.

I really only first came back when I bought all the cars I had space for in Autumn 2009, kept them all until Summer 2010, then fed them into BCA Bedford weekly during June/July 2010 when there was no used stock available if you remember - that again was a big gamble, but also worked out rather well - not everything always did or does though......

And I thought driving up and down the Uk through the night to various far flung auctions at short notice was hard ! Very interesting Marcus.

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now