The investment company Kinnevik's manager and principal owner Jan Stenbeck had done good business at starting a privately owned telephone company and privately owned advertising TV - at a time when both industries were perceived by everyone else as inextricable state monopoly.
In 1995, he threw in his will, his money and his organization's struggles in the daily newspaper - the most traditional of all media forms. But Metro would be an untraditional solution to the newspaper's tasks. "The newspaper magazine's Big Mac" Stenbeck thought of describing it as. It would be everywhere and be the same.
The analysis was in many ways insulting to the journalist corps: The difficult thing is not to fill a newspaper with content, it is to distribute it to readers in the cheapest way possible. Journalism is a standard product, not an individual creative work. The smart thing is to fill the newspaper with news agency material, and season with individual columnists.
So Metro signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Storstockholms Lokaltrafik, SL. Another agreement was reached with the news agency TT about unlimited use of material. And so Jan Stenbeck put in the wild drive, visionary and hard-seller HC Ejemyr to force it all to happen. A capitalist rebel of the kind that Stenbeck gathered around to drive the transformation of the family business.
For a few years things went fast. Several Swedish editions, several European. When Metro Paris was launched, resistance was encountered from the hard-working graphics industry. HC Ejemyr and the CEO of Metro International, Pelle Törnberg, were themselves down and hid newspaper stacks in garbage containers so that the trade fighters would not succeed in evicting the entire edition in Seine.
Then Latin America, Canada, USA. Metro International was listed separately and started a nonprofit network for urban development, with magnificent annual conferences. When it was possible to read a local Metro on the subway in New York, Jan Stenbeck's second hometown, many perceived that world domination was close.
That was just before the turn of the millennium . Then it started to go down.
What has been built up to date - like Ivar Kreuger's match company - into a worldwide organization with a common product, has broken up into a number of small national companies with the same product. This too, like Ivar Kreuger's match company.
The news that came about Metro was bad: newspaper after newspaper was sold to the local partner, many newspapers were closed. Pelle Törnberg bought the US issues as his own little empire. In 2012 Kinnevik bought Metro from the stock exchange (which the main owner tends to do either when a company is so good that you do not want to share, or when it is so bad that you do not want to let anyone else know it; in this case, it applied later ).
In February 2017, Kinnevik, in what looks to be the last flamboyant businessman in Metro's history, succeeds in selling Swedish editions (Metro Nordic Sweden AB) to Mats Qviberg's investment company Custos for SEK 50 million. Already in May of that year, Qviberg sold - for a penny - to its partner in Custos, the Norwegian businessman Christen Ager-Hansen.
Now, two years later, the Crown Magistrate has foreclosed with Metro to recover a tax debt, and on March 25, the employees had not received their salaries.
Instead, they received an email from Ager-Hansen accusing Kinnevik of concealing Metro's major weaknesses when the company was sold.