So ends another step in the entrepreneurial career of Ardeleanu, former tax inspector recruited to become CFO of Artima by Timisoara entrepreneur Florentin Banu, who created and sold the Joe wafer brand and Artima supermarket network. Ardeleanu admits in the interview for MONEY EXPRESS that “there was a bit of greed involved” when he and six partners decided to launch the loan broker: the yield was to have been an annual 30-35 percent, much higher than for many other businesses.
The first signs that the loan broker, which began its activities last July and proposed to reach a volume of €600 million worth of brokered loans in 2012, would go under appeared in fall, when Ardeleanu admitted that he refused to accept reality, saying: “I did not want to believe that we would get to a point where banks would no longer be interested in giving loans. I must admit that this threw me.”
The former CFO of the brokerage firm, which managed to broker loans worth €6 million until its closure (for the sake of comparison, the Kiwi Finance market leader, made some €200 mln in 2008) said that he finds it difficult to accept the fact that he has affected the careers of people he recruited in the second half of last year, “good people, middle managers of several banks, whose positions would in no wise have been affected even during aggressive restructuring.”
“Practically speaking, I sold them a dream, and affected their careers. What is hardest now is that I had to lay them off,” added Ardeleanu.
The associates of IpoteciDirect, including Adam Niewinski, founder of the largest Polish brokerage firm, Expander, of which Innova Capital controls 60 percent, lost €400,000-500,000 in this situation.
At present, Vlad Ardeleanu, who is involved in a residential project, for which he is selling apartments with zero yield, has decided to take a break before deciding what to do from here on. One thing is certain, he says: “I refuse to allow this failure to affect my entrepreneurial thinking.”
