Simple Danish Newsletter #19

Hi friends,

We hope you are having a great week.

There’s two things on everyone’s mind in Denmark this week: Elections for the European Parliament and… Corruption in idyllic, peaceful Denmark?

This week we’ll dive into corruption in Denmark, and why everyone is suddenly talking about it.

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Is Something Rotten in the State of Denmark?

Denmark is generally not a very corrupt country, and in fact it has ranked as the least corrupt country in the world for many years, and has been swapping 1st and 2nd place with New Zealand as the world’s least corrupt country for well over 20 years (according to the Corruption Perception Index).

However something recently happened that has rocked the boat in the little pond that is Denmark.

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The Black Swan

The event that triggered everything was that documentarist and Journalist, Mads Brügger, along with TV2, released a docu-series called “Den Sorte Svane” (The Black Swan).

In the series, Amira Smajic, a commercial lawyer that has been acting as a consultant, accountant and lawyer for criminals for well over a decade wants to come clean, break all ties, and turn her life around. As such, she agrees to act as a mole for TV2. Armed with hidden cameras and tapped phones, Amira pretends to continue her normal operations for 6-months, with journalists listening in on everything. And the scandals just keep appearing.

Amira has been acting as a link between gangs such as Hells Angels, Bandidos, Loyal To Familia, Brothas and other gangs with a lot of cash they would like to launder, and white-collar criminals from high society concerned with paying fewer taxes.

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Discoveries made in the Series

Among others, they uncover, seemingly good citizens and local politicians, lowering their tax burdens, by sending money to shell companies owned by gang-members in exchange for cash from illegal activities that they can hide away from the government.

They discover a very large construction company that is using gang members to illegally dispose of heavily contaminated soil on farmland, and how corrupt testing and control companies can make positive results for asbestos and other toxic materials go away.

They discover a partner in one of the country’s largest law firms, Horten, advertising their bankruptcy trustee services where they promise to overlook illegal activities in the company.

But what probably surprised most viewers was how well connected the gangs from the streets and the upper class of Denmark was, and how they both had their daily routine in Amira’s office.
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Where can you watch it?

There’s much more in the series, including murder, torture, gangs having access to confidential police interrogations and we highly recommend the watch. It is not free, but it can be watched with a TV2-play membership which starts at 69 kroner/month. The vocabulary and dialects are not for beginners, so consider it very advanced material.

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Fallout from the series

The series have been all over the news recently, and many many of the involved people are under further investigation, have been fired or removed from all public posts. To make things even more dramatic, Amira, regretted her decision to act as a mole, and tried to get the courts to stop the documentary from being aired, fearing for her life (understandably), but the courts declared she was well aware of the consequences before starting and that the material was of public interest.

Her own credibility has also been questioned, as it seems she has continued her illegal activities while filming the documentary, and has tried to pull some kind of double play and perhaps warning some of her closest contacts to stay away.
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Other Works by Mads Brügger

Mads Brügger is famous for similar documentaries, and has a bunch of other documentaries that are well worth watching. In The Ambassador, he goes undercover himself in the Central African Republic to uncover corruption in diamond mining, in The Mole: Undercover in North Korea we follow a normal family dad that spent 10 years infiltrating North Korean weapons distribution and methamphetamines dealing. In Cold Case: Hammerskjöld he tries to solve the mysterious death of Dag Hammerskjöld a former Secretary-General of the United Nations that died in a suspicious plane-crash.

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❤️ Our Favourite things

Past episodes of this newsletter
​We recently got quite a few new subscribers to our newsletter (If that is you, then welcome aboard, we’re very glad to have you😊), and one of our readers asked if they could find previous episodes of this newsletter archived somewhere, and the answer is yes – you can! So we thought we’d share it here, in case more people were looking. We post all newsletters on our website here. There’s a bit of a delay in postings, as we don’t always manage to post it the same week, but once in a while we go through and upload the recent postings. We hope it helps!

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Idiom of the week: At have rent mel i posen

For example:

• Advokaten siger at han har rent mel i posen, og at han ikke har brudt loven.
• De skjulte optagelser afslører at byggefirmaet ikke har rent mel i posen, og at de har dumpet giftigt affald hos landmænd.

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Word of the week: Blåøjet
​Blåøjet literally means blue-eyed, but is often used to mean that someone is naive and too keen to believe things at face value. (This doesn’t bode well for the highly blue-eyed country of Denmark).

For example:

• Hvis du stoler på ham fyren, er du simpelthen for blåøjet. Han har helt sikkert ikke rent mel i posen.
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That’s all we had for you for this week. Feel free to reply to this email with comments, suggestions or questions, as we read and reply to all emails 😊

Best regards,

Antonina & Rasmus

Denmark&Me