WHEN Borders MP Michael Moore, council leader Drew Tully, and union organiser Gerry Skelton fly into St Louis, Missouri, later today on a rescue mission to save one of the region's biggest employers, they will meet not so much an industrialist as a collector.

Jim Mills collects companies. And since 1996, he has been building a prize collection of printed circuit board companies.

He began his European collection in March 1997, with Forward Group, the valuable core of which is the former Exacta Circuits employing 1000 people in Selkirk and Galashiels. Now, just 17 months later, he wants to close down a company which has for 30 years been a mainstay of Borders industry.

The Scottish delegation will be angry. They will be pointing to the other printed circuit board company, ISL on Tyneside, which Mr Mills added to his collection just six weeks after buying Forward last year. They will ask whether the #25m subsidy from the Government to build a state-of-the-art PCB plant on Tyneside, the biggest in Europe, has not effectively been converted into a subsidy for Tyneside jobs at the direct expense of a Borders industry.

And when told that there is a global economic crisis in the air, they will want to know why it is Scotland, not Sweden, Holland, Italy, the US, or England, which is taking the pain.

Mr Mills will talk numbers.

He will say that the PCB industry in the UK , worth #500m a year, grew by 7% in 1996-97, but is now growing at 0%. He will point to the draught of recession blowing from Asia, and to a string of gloomy results from the big electronics companies round the globe. And he will cast the strong pound, for a company three-quarters dependent on exports, in the role of a killer.

But the real killers are Viasystems, the company Mr Mills set up just two years ago, and its backer the Dallas-based venture capital partnership, Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst.

Mr Mills, 60, and brother Bob, 56, set up Mills and Partners in St Louis in 1986 and in 10 years it bought or restructured 28 companies using $4bn borrowed from Hicks, Muse and its predecessor.

As the companies were sold, the bankers netted their return. By 1996, Mills and Partners was managing four companies with sales of $2bn. Hicks, Muse had set up a new fund and in just 12 months had put up over $4bn to buy companies for Mills and other proteges. Meanwhile money was now pouring into similar funds on Wall Street, as US investment banks tried to launch the sort of ''leveraged'' deals last seen in the 1980s, when financiers would launch daring bids for huge companies armed only with IOUs.

The US and world economies were buoyant, the electronics giants were booming, and demand for PCBs was exponential.

Together, the collector and the banker hit on the idea of buying up all the major PCB companies around the globe, to create a huge global player and conquer the circuit board world.

Mr Brian Haken of the Printed Circuit Board Federation, says the concept made sense. ''All the big companies now want PCBs supplied from a local source. Viasystems wanted to set up a chain which could supply every local market.''

They began in the US at the end of 1996 with a $300m strike for Circo Technologies.

Then within six weeks, in spring 1997, Mills snapped up Forward and ISL - the numbers one and two in the UK - to give it 40% of the UK market. Viasystems said it was considering buying a further 12 companies. There followed deals in Holland, Sweden, and Italy, and an abortive strike in the US. Suddenly, 17 months after its first deal, Viasystems could boast that it was the largest PCB-maker in the world.

''They have inherited plants with a whole ragbag of issues and problems, with different technologies and systems,'' said one senior industry executive. ''There was never any time for them to integrate the plants. With such rapid expansion, there was a risk that they were biting off more than they should have and doing it in too short a timescale.''

He added: ''When tough times arrive, foreign-owned companies tend to retreat back to base and UK companies are left picking up the pieces.''

Suddenly last year, the tough times arrived.

By late 1997, within months of the deals, the industry was heading steeply into a downturn, and the prices paid looked hugely expensive, But it should not have come as a surprise.

Mr Haken said: ''This happens. It is cyclical. The last big downturn in demand happened in 1992-93, so they (Viasystems) haven't experienced it before. When they bought all these companies the market was high and when they got everything in place it fell away.''

When the market stuttered, the prospect of Hicks, Muse getting a quick return on their cash quickly evaporated.

Viasystems had paid #129m for Forward, which was more than 16 times its last profit of #8m. According to the man who sold the biggest stake, founder Ray Chamberlain who netted #52m from the deal, the ''exit multiple'' of 16 was ''attractive''.

But the purchase price for ISL, never revealed, is understood to have been an astronomical #275m, or more than 25 times the group's profits.

Now, because of the botched strategy of buying two leading companies instead of one, Viasystems has over-capacity in the UK and a new highly-subsidised plant on Tyneside.

Mills and Partners, meanwhile, knows how to handle the situation. ''Performance enhancing measures have included substantial reduction of overhead through plant consolidations and headcount reductions.''