Mr. Schimmelbusch, who was born in Vienna to an Austrian-German family, began his career at Metallgesellschaft, also known as MG, in 1973. By 1989, at 44, he had become the youngest chief executive in its history. He set off on a shopping spree, turning MG into a colossus but leaving its core metals franchise vulnerable to cheaper imports from Eastern Europe.
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Heinz C. Schimmelbusch, who led Metallgesellschaft before its implosion, staged a comeback from the United States. Credit Rolf Oeser for The New York Times
To offset that, Metallgesellschaft ventured into the oil business. Through its American subsidiary, MG Refining and Marketing, it sold fuel to customers on long-term fixed-price contracts, hedging its exposure to rising oil prices by buying contracts in the futures market. When prices fell instead of rising in 1993, MG was at risk for vast trading losses.
Alarmed, Metallgesellschaft’s largest shareholder, Deutsche Bank, pushed for Mr. Schimmelbusch’s ouster and liquidated MG’s positions, turning the paper losses into real ones. With investigators searching his Frankfurt home and his former employer threatening lawsuits, Mr. Schimmelbusch moved to a suburb of Philadelphia and tried to pick up the pieces.
Some here see the MG debacle as a forerunner to the risky trading schemes that sank Enron. But experts in derivatives, notably the late Merton H. Miller, a Nobel-winning economist, argued that Deutsche Bank was to blame because it panicked.
That defense helped salvage Mr. Schimmelbusch’s reputation, especially in the United States, where he was raising money from investors for a private equity fund to get back into the metals industry. MG later settled a lawsuit against him, even helping to pay his legal fees.
“Usually, a person would never come back from that, but he is a fighter,” said Norbert Quinkert, a board member at Mr. Schimmelbusch’s company and the former head of Motorola in Germany.
Working from his home base in Wayne, Pa., Mr. Schimmelbusch assembled a portfolio of holdings through his fund, Safeguard International, and a privately held company, the Allied Resource Corporation. Several of his managers are former colleagues from Metallgesellschaft.
Advanced Metallurgical Group was ripe for a public listing, Mr. Schimmelbusch said, because it is in markets that have huge growth potential, like aerospace and solar energy. He said he chose to list the firm in Amsterdam rather than Frankfurt because of tax advantages.
Last year, Mr. Schimmelbusch said, he had hoped to take public another of his companies, PFW Aerospace, in Germany. He put off the sale because of troubles at one of its customers, Airbus.
“It’s hard to stand there and say, ‘Gentlemen, this is a great business,’ and then they go home and read in the paper about the A380,” he said, referring to the troubled Airbus jumbo jet.
Still, Mr. Schimmelbusch said he looked forward to returning to the Frankfurt market someday. He said he had repaired his ties with Deutsche Bank, with which he now does investment banking.
He even recently acquired the Metallgesellschaft name, which was retired after a series of corporate overhauls. He said he had not decided what to do with it, although one can bet it will have something to do with metals. “I’m a fully depreciated metals guy,” he said.