Björgólfur Guðmundsson

Born in Reykjavík, Iceland, Björgólfur's parents were Guðmundur Pétur Ólafsson (1911–79) and Kristín Davíðsdóttir.

Björgólfur has an elder brother, Davíð, and three sisters.

Björgólfur Guðmundsson (born 2 January 1941) is an Icelandic businessman and former chairman and owner of West Ham United.

Björgólfur was Iceland's second wealthiest businessman worth more than a billion dollars — his son, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson being the first.

He was at one time the majority owner and chairman of the now nationalised Icelandic bank Landsbanki, the second largest company in Iceland.

By the account of Björgólfur's son, he was from a working-class background, and his father Guðmundur was affected by a stroke around 1945.

Accounts vary, but it has been claimed that in 1958 Björgólfur was asked by the family of Thor Philip Axel Jensen, Iceland's foremost businessman of the time, to accompany Hallgrímur Fr. Hallgrímsson to the US to bring back Hallgrímur's daughter Margrét Þóra Hallgrímsson, who had left her first marriage to Haukur Clausen to marry the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell.

Björgólfur's son suggests, however, that the two met only after Þóra's return to Iceland following her split with Rockwell.

The young Björgólfur graduated from the Commercial College of Iceland in 1962, was an organiser of the Independence Party youth wing and is described by Roger Boyes as 'a promising young man, handsome, clean-cut, with reasonable English and a smooth, reassuring manner.'.

From 1962 to 1977, Björgólfur was the founder and director of Dósagerðin hf.; from 1977 to 1986 he was the director of Hafskip, with further responsibilities for its various daughter companies in the Europe and the USA.

Either way, Björgólfur married Þóra in 1963 and adopted her children by Clausen (Örn Friðrik, b. 1951) and Rockwell (Hallgrímur, b. 1954; Margrét, 1955–89; and Evelyn Bentína).

The couple subsequently had a child of their own, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson (b. 1967).

During much of this period, Björgólfur was, in the estimation of his son Björgólfur Thor, 'a highly functional alcoholic', but went into rehab in Hazelden, Minnesota, in 1978 and has not drank since.

The shipping business Hafskip was the main competitor to Iceland's established shipping operator Eimskip (co-founded by the father of Björgólfur's wife).

In Roger Boyes's account,

Björgólfur was prosecuted for bookkeeping irregularities, receiving a twelve-month suspended jail sentence, but in Illugi Jökulsson's interpretation, this

The affair had a considerable effect on Björgólfur and his son, and both at times portrayed their subsequent business activities as a way to take revenge on the people they saw as their persecutors and to regain their reputations.

One of the avenues through which Björgólfur worked to restore his reputation in the years following the Hafskip affair was by starting a successful alcoholics' rehabilitation centre in Reykjavík.

From 1986 to 1991, Björgólfur was the director and owner of Icestar Ltd. in Copenhagen and a consultant on the shipping business for AMA Agencies in London.

In the 1990s he was sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years, for bookkeeping offences, having faced around 450 charges.

He went to Russia, remade his fortune and returned to Iceland, where he also had interests in shipping, publishing, food, communications and property.

In the early 1990s Pharmaco was required to sell off its unneeded bottling machines, and Björgólfur took the opportunity, through a partner, Ingimar Haukur Ingimarsson, who was already based in St Petersburg, to co-found Bravo Brewery with Magnús Þorsteinsson (chairman of Avion Group) and Björgólfur's own son Björgólfur Thor.

Notwithstanding legal wrangles with Ingimar Haukur, Bravo Brewery became a success.

Björgólfur Guðmundsson and his son later sold the venture to Heineken for $400 million which they invested both in Iceland and abroad.

Danish journalists noted that in St. Petersburg, the Committee on External Economic Relations in Saint Petersburg's Mayor's office was responsible for foreigners in Saint Petersburg.

The committee's chairman was Vladimir Putin.

The Icelandic businessmen, together with Russian partners, founded the bottling company Baltic Bottling Plant, which was sold to Pepsi.

In 1991, in the wake of the Hafskip affair, Björgólfur began running the brewery and soft drinks unit of Pharmaco, a pharmaceuticals group, in 1991.

They moved to brewing and founded the brewing company Bravo International OOO in August 1996 which became Bravo International JSC in December 1997.

Bravo Brewery became a success with the premium beer Botchkarov.

Ilya Weismann, deputy director of competing beverage company Baltic, was assassinated on 10 January 2000.

Soon afterwards Baltic director general Aslanbek Chochiev was also assassinated.

One competing St Petersburg brewery burned to the ground.

The company became the fastest growing brewery in Russia.

Heineken bought the extraordinarily successful brewery for $400m in 2002 and Björgólfur returned to Iceland.

In 2005 an article in The Guardian wondered where the Icelandic money comes from and noted that in the 1990s the three Icelandic businessmen "were not only ploughing money into the country but doing it in the city regarded as the Russian mafia capital. That investment was being made in the drinks sector, seen by the mafia as the industry of choice."

Competitors in the St. Petersburg brewing market faced problems.

He was ranked by Forbes magazine in March 2008 as the 1014th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $1.1 billion.

In December of the same year Forbes revalued his net worth to $0, and on 31 July 2009 he was declared bankrupt by the Icelandic courts with debts of almost £500 million (96 billion ISK).

Björgólfur was described in an article written by Jamie Jackson of The Guardian as "a former footballer, furniture packer and law student, a recovering alcoholic of 30 years and an old-fashioned philanthropist".