One in a series.
Re: “Eriksson Defines Himself with Clarity”
Debate over Göran Eriksson’s global creds as an environmentalist floated away like a pesky cloud minutes into the entrepreneur’s first City Council meeting this month.
Councilman Eriksson, by a 3-2 margin, was voted onto an open seat on the Council’s ultimate environmental policy vehicle, the Sustainability Committee.
He will team with Meghan Sahli-Wells, the face of arch-progressive environmentalism on the Council since first being elected four years ago last month.
Ms. Sahli-Wells will learn what Mr. Eriksson’s colleagues in international commerce have known for decades – broadly knowledgeable, the quiet, understated manner he portrays in public is the same face he wears in off-stage negotiations, firm, cerebral, persuasive, never argumentative.
Environmental matters have formed a prominent dimension of his business life for the last dozen years.
“All of my life,” he says, “I have been interested in looking at problems and trying to figure out how to solve them. That is one of the reasons I was drawn to the environment.”
Mr. Eriksson and his wife Britta own two businesses. One, begun in 1994, is a financial services corporation that assists American companies “in navigating and managing value-added tax (VAT) issues they encounter in Europe and Asia,” he says.
“This is a very specialized niche. We are one of the leading companies in the United States.”
He said American firms fail to give the VAT issue more than a cursory look.
The Erikssons’ second enterprise is ESI Techtrans, a consulting firm oriented toward German and Scandanavian businesses. The Erikssons assist them in bringing their medical devices and primarily environmental technology to the United States.
