The Scandinavian countries are known to be the most socially advanced and economically prosperous thanks to their stable socio-political systems with low crime rates, transparency and least tolerance to corruption, and welcoming immigrants from across the world, particularly the conflict zones. However, just as how the impact of conflict afar has spilled over into these societies, the Nordic nations, particularly Sweden and Denmark are now confronted by socio-political chaos with increasing organised crime, corruption and social disorder. In this second part of the three-part year-ender series, Stig Toft Madsen describes the episodes of social chaos in Sweden, and Denmark, to highlight how the year has been one of extremes.
Text page image: A rally in Gothenburg in support of refugees. Source: Nordstjernan
Home page image: Another rally supporting refugees. Source: X
Sweden is in the grip of violent crime to a higher degree than most other countries in Europe. In 2022, the gun-murder rate in Stockholm was at least 25 times higher than that of London on a per capita basis. In that year, almost half of suspects in gun-related murder and manslaughter were aged between 15 and 20.
This development has been long underway. In 2011, the Danish journalist Mikael Jalving published Absolute Sweden – a Travel in the Realm of Silence (Absolut Sverige – en rejse i tavshedens rige), which showed the dire consequences of Sweden’s well-intended, but unrealistic, approach to multiculturalism. In 2024, in a long podcast, Jalving discussed the current spillover of crime and terror from Sweden to Denmark with other commentators. Their views were far apart. Jalving stuck to his.
A heavily academic analysis of the Swedish descent into disorder has been made by the anthropologist Jonathan Friedmann in his book PC Worlds: Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony from 2019 in which he looks back at his many decades in Sweden as an American anthropologist. Like Jalving, Friedman holds the Swedish elite - including his colleagues in academia – responsible for the road taken. Friedman has been criticized, even by his own former students,
Photo: Anti-migration protesters attend a rally at the border town Tornio between Sweden and Finland, 03 October 2015. Courtesy: Daily Scandinavian
But basically, he has been ignored. Jalving and Friedman are both outsiders. It took decades for the scales to fall from the eyes of the politically correct Swedish elite.
In the last few years, however, things have changed drastically. The elections in 2022 brought to power a centre-right coalition government led by The Moderates. This coalition explicitly relies on the support of the right-wing Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), who secured 20,5% of the votes. For years, other parties had denied Sverigedemokraterna's influence in parliament.
2022 marked the turning point in this regard. Now, when you look up the official homepage of the Swedish government, this is what you see:
Sweden’s migration policy is undergoing a paradigm shift. The Government is intensifying its efforts to reduce, in full compliance with Sweden’s international commitments, the number of migrants coming irregularly to Sweden. Labour immigration fraud and abuses must be stopped and the ‘shadow society’ combated. Sweden will continue to have dignified reception standards, and those who have no grounds for protection or other legal right to stay in Sweden must be expelled.
The website goes on to list the major areas of intervention under the following headings: stricter asylum legislation, combating the ‘shadow society,’, increased number of returns and initiatives for repatriation (assistance to the tune of USD 32,000 will be offered), stricter conditions for low-skilled labour immigration and improved conditions for highly skilled labour, increased measure for revoking residence permits, stricter conditions for family member immigration, and integration requirements (including changing the rules for revoking citizenship).
In 2014, the then Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfelt had encouraged the Swedes to open their hearts to more immigrants and refugees. Reinfelt belongs to The Moderate party, i.e. the same party that now seeks to control the stream of migrants by harsh measures.
To a considerable extent, the Swedish government has used Denmark as a model for its new policies, but the starting points are different. Sweden has more immigrants from the Greater Middle East than Denmark, and the criminals have more power vis-à-vis the police and other authorities than in Denmark.
Clans: Vertical integration and lateral expansion
In Sweden, biker groups such as Hells Angels and Bandidos, have a long history and a long criminal record. More recently immigrant gangs, uniformed or non-uniformed, have grown more prominent. However, in 2024 the focus of attention has shifted to broader groupings referred to as “clans.” In anthropological literature, clans consist of real or imagined kin descended from a common ancestor or from a mythical being.
In their book Klanerne - De kriminelle netværk bag bandekrigen i Sverige (The Clans – The Criminal Network Behind the Gang War in Sweden), Jan Persson and Johannes Wahlström count 36 clans operating in Sweden.
Their businesses include arms, drugs, prostitution, blackmail, and money laundering, but they also have investments in groceries, haircutting saloons, jewellery shops, restaurants, nightclubs, and money exchange bureaus. They may run car workshops or transport firms, and they frequently invest in real estate. Clan members may seek political office.
Photo: Police check a bikers party at Dusseldorf-Flingern. Picture by Gerhardt Berget, RPOnline
Some of the clans have extensive interests in their home countries, or they may operate from third countries such as Spain. Most clans are Muslims, but there are also Christians and even Yazidis. The book recounts a clash between two groups of Yazidis.
Upon their arrival in Sweden, many Yazidis got jobs in the transport business. This helped them secure residence permits, but they had to pay part of their wages to clan leaders owning the transport business. To compensate for this loss of income, some of them entered the drug trade, which could be combined with their job as drivers. Disputes regarding bad debt led to violent clashes among the Yazidis.
This illustrates what may be the main point of the book: Not all members of these extended kinship groups have crime as their main occupation. Many have other jobs, including important jobs, in the wider economy from where they may be able to extend occasional service to their real or fictive kin, as and when required.
Persson and Wahlström portray the clans as closed corporate communities, whose predatory expansion is enabled by kinship bonds and common values, and a collectivistic rejection of the norms of the host society. This solidarity has allowed the street gangs, businessmen, and clan elders to integrate vertically and expand laterally. The clans, thus, represent an agglutinated, sticky force able to extend its sway over the economy, society, and the state.
Some anthropologists would disagree with this image of clans. Clans do not operate smoothly as corporate entities. “Segmentary opposition” between subunits and fuzzy borders subject them to repeated fission and fusion. Clans tend to feud, which is why the payment of blood money characterizes clan societies. Moreover, when outside actors, such as foreign states, enter the equation, the clans no longer operate as an entity of its own, but as an intermediary.In any case, the ability of clans and gangs to make a profit alters the economic landscape. Instead of native Swedes holding relatively undisputed freehold title to the various resources of their country, criminals increasingly obtain de facto possession or de jure ownership of resources. To do this, they take the help of “facilitators,” who operate in the twilight zone between the legal and the unlawful.
In a 2024 report titled Facilitators of criminal networks, The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ) concluded thus:
Our study suggests that many members of criminal networks appear to have a substantial interest in using facilitators. Access to such facilitators is limited, but they can be found in all studied sectors. These mainly include the criminal justice system, numerous local government administrations, banking and finance, real estate, incorporation, bookkeeping and accounting services, legal services, security and surveillance, and transport. Overall, the identified cases occur in most regions of Sweden. This is therefore not solely a metropolitan phenomenon. The degree of activity among the identified facilitators ranges from sporadic, brief assistance to long-term and frequent assistance provided to numerous members of different criminal networks.
The Black Swan
On 5th April, the Danish politician Frederik Vad in a speech in parliament drew attention to the infiltration of Swedish institutions by criminal groups. The response was one of disbelief. It could not be true, and it could not happen here, was the prevailing sentiment. Then, on 28th May, the Danish television channel TV2 featured a five-part documentary called The Black Swan (Den Sorte Svane), which made it abundantly clear that it was true in Denmark as well.
The main character was Amira Smajic, whose parents had reached Denmark from Bosnia. Smajic had become a business lawyer with a clientele counting criminals from various networks. Apparently feeling a sting of remorse, she contacted a well-known filmmaker, Mads Brügger, offering to tell her story.
They agreed that she would open a new office. This office attracted numerous old and new clients, who freely discussed their past exploits and their plans. TV2 had bugged the office, and the result was an exposure of the links between the netherworld, the world of small and big enterprises, and lawyers and accountants the like of which had never been seen on Danish TV. Unlike many other documentaries characterized by feigned suspense, grainy pictures, and conversations in barely audible foreign tongues, The Black Swan ran across the screen in clear pictures, with conversations in audible Danish, and an engaging storyline.
Noteworthy figures in the documentary included Fasar Abrar Raja, whose family had come from Punjab in Pakistan. His face had been disfigured when he was young due to an explosion, but he remained a lively character. Cracking jokes and telling stories of how he had misled judges to stay out of jail, he came across as both likeable and scary. Raja was jailed as a result of the TV programme, but he was released in November awaiting trial at a later date.
Other notable characters were the two native Danish lawyers, Nicolai Dyhr and Lise Roulund. Nicolai Dyhr was an expert in bankruptcy cases and a partner in one of the largest Danish law firms, Horten. On-screen, he appeared hand-in-glove with the criminals, who consulted him. To regain its respectability, Horten quickly fired Nicolai Dyhr and conducted an internal investigation to make sure he was a lone rogue. The investigation did not find any other rogues – i.e. until the company suddenly fired five more of its lawyers in order to “restore credibility.”
Lise Roulund was a female lawyer, who came out as equally devoid of scruples as her male counterpart. At one point, she handed over to Raja a confidential USB drive with details from the court hearings of an enemy of his. As a result of the documentary, Roulund lost her right to practice. Together with several others from the documentary, she is facing a criminal investigation.
Danish lawyers have been able to maintain their professional reputation for a long period, but 2024 left the profession scarred. The Black Swan did more than any previous documentary to uncover professional malpractice.
Bankers-lawyers-police-politicians
The legal profession is not the only profession that has lost some of its sheen. Banks, too, have come under a cloud for channelling billions of dollars from Russia via Danish banks in the Baltic countries onwards, with no questions asked.
In 2022, the biggest Danish bank, Danske Bank, was sentenced to pay a fine of approximately USD 500 million for money laundering. In 2024, in an off-shot of this case, a Russian woman living in Denmark was awarded a nine-year jail sentence for laundering around USD 4.1 billion. This was the highest-ever jail sentence for an economic crime awarded in Denmark.
Photo: About 180.000 Danes are victims of digital fraud annually. This advertisement encourages senior citizens to avoid being exposed to fraudsters (svindlerne). It was put up by the Nordea bank on a bus stop. Copenhagen, November 2024. Picture by Stig Toft Madsen.
Similarly, Nordea Bank is under investigation for having laundered around USD 3.7 billion through its Baltic branches in the years up to 2015. This case is still pending. In their effort to restore credibility, these banks have moved hundreds of their employees to their compliance departments. The banks now want to project themselves as shields against crime, and no longer as its facilitators. The reader may wonder why the police do not figure prominently in The Black Swan. After all, the police are involved in corruption in many countries worldwide.
All I can say is that cases of corruption among the police are still rare in Denmark. However, they do occur. In early 2024, Bettina Jensen, a high-ranking officer in the Danish National Police (Rigspolitiet) was convicted and jailed for having allotted a string of consultancy jobs to a friend of hers. This made it possible for them to go to Sweden together on shopping sprees, etc.
In November 2024, Jensen agreed to pay back to the National Police USD 284,000, thereby avoiding further legal actions. The case was uncovered by a journalist in 2016. In a decision, which looks strange to me, the Lower Court exonerated the two women. It took eight years and an appeal to the Eastern High Court to convict the two women.
Politicians are another group that is globally associated with crime and corruption. Denmark ranks highest on Transparency International’s “Corruption Perception Index.” It is, therefore, not surprising that Danish parliamentarians enjoy a good reputation.
However, things may be different at the municipal level. Thus, in November, one of the main characters in The Black Swan, Carl Richard Christensen, was charged with helping a Hells Angels member launder money. Christensen had earlier been a counsellor for the Social Democratic Party in Køge Municipality south of Copenhagen.
In March this year, Dragan Popovic, a Serb living in Denmark, was accused of assisting two Serbian brothers in their cocaine trade. Popovic was found guilty of money laundering, but he appealed the verdict of the Lower Court. Popovic is a member of the Municipal Council in the city of Hillerød north of Copenhagen. Other members of the council have urged Popovic to vacate his seat. However, Popovic has the right to stay as long as his appeal is under consideration, and that is what he has chosen to do.
Thus, in my simple review of some key pillars of Nordic society, the financial sector may be said to have come in bad standing a decade ago. In 2024, it was the turn of the lawyers to come under intense public scrutiny. The police and the elite politicians have not, so far, been that closely associated with crime and corruption. But even if politicians have themselves stayed out of crime, they run the risk of furthering crime by not building the necessary dikes and bulwarks.
Negligence, rather than collusion, is the sin of omission that threatens their reputation.
In December 2024, yet another scandal was exposed by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR. It appears that an Albanian subcontractor hired Albanian workers on manipulated contracts. By presenting them as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers needed in the Danish economy, the subcontractor could secure his compatriot's construction jobs on two university hospitals and a major new bridge in Denmark.
The workers did not receive the high salary they were supposed to have received but surrendered part of their wages to their Albanian benefactor. The Albanians worked for an Italian consortium that had been awarded the contract after an EU tender. The Italians disputed the findings of the documentary and announced it would continue to work with the Albanian workforce.
The predictable reaction on the part of the minister concerned was shock and alarm. The concerned department argued that although the Italian consortium was under a cloud of suspicion in other countries, Denmark had to accept its offer. However, given that fraud and manipulation were to be expected, could not the Danish authorities have shown due diligence by keeping a close eye on the projects?
After all, the contracts of the three projects were worth around USD 2.5 billion.
