The boardroom at Investor in Stockholm is a spartan affair, for a company worth £9 billion. A long, polished table, 15 chairs, a stack of pencils, some plain notepaper and a judge's gavel. In the corner of the room is a computer, which constantly tracks the share prices of Investor's companies around the world. The gold trimmings on the mirror and on the single, small painting, complete the message: quiet wealth, generated over many decades.
To be a Wallenberg in Sweden would be the equivalent of an Irish person having four grandparents called Smurfit, O'Reilly, De Valera and Whitaker. Aside from controlling much of the Swedish stock exchange for a century, various Wallenbergs have taken time out to be judges, foreign ministers and tennis champions.
Raoul Wallenberg was Swedish envoy to Hungary when the Nazis rolled in to Budapest. Instead of freezing in terror, like the diplomats of so many other neutral countries, he printed up tens of thousands of false documents identifying the bearer as a Swede, and distributed them to Jewish families. In six months, he saved 100,000 people from the gas chambers.
Back in Sweden, however, according to documents uncovered earlier this year, other members of the family were involved in deals that allowed Nazi officers to launder plundered gold.
Peter Wallenberg, now the head of the family, remembers the war from the perspective of a young conscript in the Swedish army, allowed home on leave perhaps twice a year. He was shocked when he read the latest reports.
"We didn't feel very good at all. I am the only member of the close family that has gone through these things, although of course I wasn't old enough to be involved in them. But I remember the talk in the family at the time, and I know how upset my father was, and his brother, my uncle, was at times during the war."
Much of what has been reported, he insists, was exaggerated. He points out that during the war, all external trade was rigidly regulated by the Swedish government; every nut or bolt that came in or out had to be negotiated with the Germans and the Allies.
"What I do know about is the atmosphere in the country at that time, and how different that atmosphere was compared to peace time. Here was a country, totally surrounded by the Germans who were repeatedly threatening to do this and do that if they didn't get their way.
"Much of it was handled by the Swedish government in what we could call an acceptable way. Some of it we didn't like at the time but realised that we had very little say. We had German aircraft flying over us every day. We had German ships running inshore to be in neutral waters, continuously, we had German troop trains being transited through Sweden to Norway, and later on through Finland too.
"I would like to ask one of these bigshots that are so critical of our role during the war, what would they have done if we had been attacked by the Germans? What would the West have done? Naught!"
After the war, he went to university, and worked for subsidiaries of Atlas Copco, one of the family's firms, in the United States, Rhodesia, Congo and Britain. By the start of the 1970s, he was back in Sweden, working in top management or on the board of family companies such as SE Banken, Ericsson, Electrolux SAS, Skandia, STORA and Atlas.
During these days, he was criticised harshly and publicly by his father, Mr Marcus Wallenberg, who said he was "incompetent". But fate had it that when his father died in 1982, Mr Peter Wallenberg took over as chairman of Investor, the family's investment company that controls about 45 per cent of the Swedish stock market.
His performance was stellar. Between then and when he retired last year, Investor had an average annual return of 20 per cent. He also maintained the key to the power of the Wallenberg empire, its "A-shares", which often have 10 times the voting rights of ordinary shares. In Electrolux, for example, Investor holds just 1 per cent of the share capital, but 45 per cent of the voting rights.
These days, he is an enthusiast for developing the Baltic region, pushing the axis of modern Europe slightly further to the north. He adopts a most un-politically correct stance on why this is important, but one which has a certain logic for a Swede.
In brief, he doesn't trust the Russians, and he reckons they would be tempted to invade the region yet again unless the Baltic republics can build a strong economy, so integrated with the rest of Europe that it becomes politically impossible to send in the tanks.
"We are, to all intents and purposes, Europe's northern flank. It's just that Europe doesn't care and is so preoccupied with its own problems it would prefer not to have to think about it.
"For centuries, people on the east coast of Sweden have scared their kids with `The Russians'. They say: `If you're not good, we'll call for the Russians'. And we've had them at our throats from time to time over centuries. We never called them the Soviets, we always called them the Russians, because we knew that it didn't make any difference if they were communists or czarists, they were all bad!"
The best the West can do is help the former Eastern Bloc states in the Baltic develop as quickly as possible, he adds.
"We are talking about good people, hard-working people, but their criminal laws have been very different from the Western ones," he says. "There's no capital in these countries - we have a capital structure in all of our countries, we never think of it."
His fear of war also tempers any optimism he might have about the 21st century. "We have a fantastic capacity, we human beings, to create trouble for ourselves. We're supposed to be so highly educated, so civilised. And we're all against war. But with a painful regularity in history, we start wars, and then we find it hard to stop them."
In economics too, he adds, the best human minds seem incapable of learning from the past. "Is it an instinct to gamble? It seems like that to me. We're not really happy when things are going well."
