His children write in an email to TT that it is with great sorrow they announce that their father has passed away.
"Our father meant a lot to us in the family and we will always remember him with warmth”, they write.
Percy Barnevik was the bearded director, unusual among the top executives at the time. And he became known as the CEO who only needed a few hours of sleep – an efficient CEO with a firm grip and high demands on those around him.
Career at the top
Grown up in Uddevalla, he ended up, via several years in the leadership of Sandvik, as CEO of the then Asea, a company that under his leadership in the late 1980s was merged with the Swiss Brown Boveri and formed the industrial giant ABB, at the time the world's largest corporate merger across national borders.
Then and there and during the 1990s, Percy Barnevik was on everyone's lips in the Swedish business community and his career was at the top.
But when ABB got gigantic lawsuits related to asbestos, it started to creak in the financial joints. Percy Barnevik was revealed in 2002 to have a pension agreement with ABB that gave him astronomical 800-900 million kronor – money that he, after some twists in the media, partly (570 million) paid back.
Dedicated himself to charity
In recent years, Percy Barnevik spent a lot of time and money on charity in the organization Hand in hand. Like many others, he wrote books, partly about leadership, but also about the twists and turns of his giant pension and the betrayal by Peter Wallenberg, who was the one who dismissed Barnevik from the role of chairman of the Wallenberg sphere's power company Investor in the wake of the pension scandal.
Percy Barnevik died after a short illness. The funeral will take place in the circle of the closest relatives.
