Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“A tin-can industry, you mean.”

“Not quite, but something along those lines. I have no idea who he knew at the AIA, but he walked out with sixty million kronor.”

“This is starting to get interesting. Let me guess: that was the last anyone saw of the money.”

“Wrong.” Lindberg gave a sly smile before he fortified himself with a few more sips of brandy.

“What happened after that is a piece of classic bookkeeping. Wennerström really did set up a packaging factory in Poland, in Lódz. The company was called Minos. AIA received a few enthusiastic reports during 1993, then silence. In 1994, Minos, out of the blue, collapsed.”

Lindberg put his empty glass down with an emphatic smack.

“The problem with AIA was that there was no real system in place for reporting on the project. You remember those days: everyone was so optimistic when the Berlin Wall came down. Democracy was going to be introduced, the threat of nuclear war was over, and the Bolsheviks would turn into regular little capitalists overnight. The government wanted to nail down democracy in the East. Every capitalist wanted to jump on the bandwagon and help build the new Europe.”

“I didn’t know that capitalists were so anxious to get involved in charity.”

“Believe me, it was a capitalist’s wet dream. Russia and Eastern Europe may be the world’s biggest untapped markets after China. Industry had no problem joining hands with the government, especially when the companies were required to put up only a token investment. In all, AIA swallowed about thirty billion kronor of the taxpayers’ money. It was supposed to come back in future profits. Formally, AIA was the government’s initiative, but the influence of industry was so great that in actual fact the AIA board was operating independently.”

“So is there a story in all this?”

“Be patient. When the project started there was no problem with financing. Sweden hadn’t yet been hit by the interest-rate shock. The government was happy to plug AIA as one of the biggest Swedish efforts to promote democracy in the East.”

“And this was all under the Conservative government?”

“Don’t get politics mixed up in this. It’s all about money and it makes no difference if the Social Democrats or the moderates appoint the ministers. So, full speed ahead. Then came the foreign-exchange problems, and after that some crazy New Democrats – remember them? – started whining that there was a shortage of oversight in what AIA was into. One of their henchmen had confused AIA with the Swedish International Development Authority and thought it was all some damn do-gooder project like the one in Tanzania. In the spring of 1994 a commission was appointed to investigate. At that time there were concerns about several projects, but one of the first to be investigated was Minos.”

“And Wennerström couldn’t show what the funds had been used for.”

“Far from it. He produced an excellent report which showed that around fifty-four million kronor was invested in Minos. But it turned out that there were too many huge administrative problems in what was left of Poland for a modern packaging industry to be able to function. In practice their factory was shut out by the competition from a similar German project. The Germans were doing their best to buy up the entire Eastern Bloc.”

“You said that he had been given sixty million kronor.”

“Exactly. The money served as an interest-free loan. The idea, of course, was that the companies would pay back part of the money over a number of years. But Minos had gone under and Wennerström could not be blamed for it. Here the state guarantees kicked in, and Wennerström was indemnified. All he needed to do was pay back the money that was lost when Minos went under, and he could also show that he had lost a corresponding amount of his own money.”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly. The government supplied billions in tax money, and diplomats to open doors. Industries got the money and used it to invest in joint ventures from which they later reaped vast profits. In other words, business as usual.”

“You’re a cynic. The loans were supposed to be paid back to the state.”

“You said that they were interest-free. So that means the taxpayers got nothing at all for putting up the cash. Wennerström got sixty million, and invested fifty-four million of it. What happened to the other six million?”

“When it became clear that the AIA project was going to be investigated, Wennerström sent a cheque for six million to AIA for the difference. So the matter was settled, legally at least.”

“It sounds as though Wennerström frittered away a little money for AIA. But compared with the half billion that disappeared from Skanska or the CEO of ABB’s golden parachute of more than a billion kronor – which really upset people – this doesn’t seem to be much to write about,” Blomkvist said. “Today’s readers are pretty tired of stories about incompetent speculators, even if it’s with public funds. Is there more to the story?”

“It gets better.”

“How do you know all this about Wennerström’s deals in Poland?”

“I worked at Handelsbanken in the nineties. Guess who wrote the reports for the bank’s representative in AIA?”

“Aha. Tell me more.”

“Well, AIA got their report from Wennerström. Documents were drawn up. The balance of the money had been paid back. That six million coming back was very clever.”

“Get to the point.”

“But, my dear Blomkvist, that is the point. AIA was satisfied with Wennerström’s report. It was an investment that went to hell, but there was no criticism of the way it had been managed. We looked at invoices and transfers and all the documents. Everything was meticulously accounted for. I believed it. My boss believed it. AIA believed it, and the government had nothing to say.”

“Where’s the hook?”

“This is where the story gets ticklish,” Lindberg said, looking surprisingly sober. “And since you’re a journalist, this is off the record.”

“Come off it. You can’t sit there telling me all this stuff and then say I can’t use it.”

“I certainly can. What I’ve told you so far is in the public record. You can look up the report if you want. The rest of the story – what I haven’t told you – you can write about, but you’ll have to treat me as an anonymous source.”

“OK, but ‘off the record’ in current terminology means that I’ve been told something in confidence and can’t write about it.”

“Screw the terminology. Write whatever the hell you want, but I’m your anonymous source. Are we agreed?”

“Of course,” Blomkvist said.

In hindsight, this was a mistake.

“All right then. The Minos story took place more than a decade ago, just after the Wall came down and the Bolsheviks starting acting like decent capitalists. I was one of the people who investigated Wennerström, and the whole time I thought there was something damned odd about his story.”

“Why didn’t you say so when you signed off on his report?”

“I discussed it with my boss. But the problem was that there wasn’t anything to pinpoint. The documents were all OK, I had only to sign the report. Every time I’ve seen Wennerström’s name in the press since then I think about Minos, and not least because some years later, in the mid-nineties, my bank was doing some business with Wennerström. Pretty big business, actually, and it didn’t turn out so well.”

“He cheated you?”

“No, nothing that obvious. We both made money on the deals. It was more that… I don’t know quite how to explain it, and now I’m talking about my own employer, and I don’t want to do that. But what struck me – the lasting and overall impression, as they say – was not positive. Wennerström is presented in the media as a tremendous financial oracle. He thrives on that. It’s his ‘trust capital.’”