Alex Jurshevski, co-founder and CEO of London-based specialist
investment firm Recovery Partners, is no stranger to turnrounds.
This, after all, is the Canadian-born investment banker who was
headhunted from Wood Gundy's Tokyo office in 1993 to sort out New
Zealand's finances. The country's foreign currency borrowing binge
of the 1970s and early 1980s had brought the economy to its knees
and triggered a crisis. As head of portfolio management in the
finance ministry's debt management office, Jurshevski and his
colleagues set about restructuring public-sector finances.
Three years later, the job was done: New Zealand had no
foreign-currency debt, huge financial savings had been made, the
credit rating was up two notches and the...
