Page 3
As he sat there in the boat, Blomkvist filled his glass with Reimersholms brandy and leaned back, trying to remember what little he knew about Wennerstrom. Born up in Norrland, where in the seventies he set up an investment company. He made money and moved to Stockholm, and there his career took off in the eighties. He created Wennerstrom-gruppen, the Wennerstrom Group, when they set up offices in London and New York and the company started to get mentioned in the same articles as Beijer. He traded stock and options and liked to make quick deals, and he emerged in the celebrity press as one of Sweden's numerous billionaires with a city home on Strandvagen, a fabulous summer villa on the island of Varmdo, and an eighty-two-foot motor yacht that he bought from a bankrupt former tennis star. He was a bean counter, naturally, but the eighties was the decade of the bean counters and property speculators, and Wennerstrom had not made a significantly big splash. On the contrary, he had remained something of a man in the shadows among his peers. He lacked Jan Stenbeck's flamboyance and did not spread himself all over the tabloids like Percy Barnevik. He said goodbye to real estate and instead made massive investments in the former Eastern Bloc. When the bubble burst in the nineties and one managing director after another was forced to cash in his golden parachute, Wennerstrom's company came out of it in remarkably good shape. "A Swedish success story," as the Financial Times called it.
"That was 1992," Lindberg said. "Wennerstrom contacted AIA and said he wanted funding. He presented a plan, seemingly backed by interests in Poland, which aimed at establishing an industry for the manufacture of packaging for foodstuffs. "
"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. Wennerstrom really did set up a packaging factory in Poland, in Lodz. 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 Wennerstrom 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 Wennerstrom could not be blamed for it. Here the state guarantees kicked in, and Wennerstrom 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. Wennerstrom 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, Wennerstrom sent a cheque for six million to AIA for the difference. So the matter was settled, legally at least. "
"It sounds as though Wennerstrom 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 Wennerstrom'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 Wennerstrom. 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 Wennerstrom'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 Wennerstrom, 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 Wennerstrom'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 Wennerstrom. 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. Wennerstrom is presented in the media as a tremendous financial oracle. He thrives on that. It's his 'trust capital. '"
"I know what you mean. "
"My impression was that the man was all bluff. He wasn't even particularly bright as a financier. In fact, I thought he was damned ignorant about certain subjects although he had some really sharp young warriors for advisers. Above all, I really didn't care for him personally. "
"So?"
"A few years ago I went down to Poland on some other matter. Our group had dinner with some investors in Lodz, and I found myself at the same table as the mayor. We talked about the difficulty of getting Poland's economy on its feet and all that, and somehow or other I mentioned the Minos project. The mayor looked quite astonished for a moment - as if he had never heard of Minos. He told me it was some crummy little business and nothing ever came of it. He laughed and said - I'm quoting word for word - that if that was the best our investors could manage, then Sweden wasn't long for this life. Are you following me?"
"That mayor of Lodz is obviously a sharp fellow, but go on. "
"The next day I had a meeting in the morning, but the rest of my day was free. For the hell of it I drove out to look at the shut-down Minos factory in a small town outside of Lodz. The giant Minos factory was a ram-shackle structure. A corrugated iron storage building that the Red Army had built in the fifties. I found a watchman on the property who could speak a little German and discovered that one of his cousins had worked at Minos and we went over to his house nearby. The watchman interpreted. Are you interested in hearing what he had to say?"
"I can hardly wait. "
"Minos opened in the autumn of 1992. There were at most fifteen employees, the majority of them old women. Their pay was around one hundred fifty kronor a month. At first there were no machines, so the workforce spent their time cleaning up the place. In early October three cardboard box machines arrived from Portugal. They were old and completely obsolete. The scrap value couldn't have been more than a few thousand kronor. The machines did work, but they kept breaking down. Naturally there were no spare parts, so Minos suffered endless stoppages. "
"This is starting to sound like a story," Blomkvist said. "What did they make at Minos?"
"Throughout 1992 and half of 1993 they produced simple cardboard boxes for washing powders and egg cartons and the like. Then they started making paper bags. But the factory could never get enough raw materials, so there was never a question of much volume of production. "
"This doesn't sound like a gigantic investment. "
"I ran the numbers. The total rent must have been around 15,000 kronor for two years. Wages may have amounted to 150,000 SEK at most - and I'm being generous here. Cost of machines and cost of freight. . . a van to deliver the egg cartons. . . I'm guessing 250,000. Add fees for permits, a little travelling back and forth - apparently one person from Sweden did visit the site a few times. It looks as though the whole operation ran for under two million. One day in the summer of 1993 the foreman came down to the factory and said it was shut down, and a while later a Hungarian lorry appeared and carried off the machinery. Bye-bye, Minos. "
In the course of the trial Blomkvist had often thought of that Midsummer Eve. For large parts of the evening the tone of the conversation made it feel as if they were back at school, having a friendly argument. As teenagers they had shared the burdens common to that stage in life. As grown-ups they were effectively strangers, by now quite different sorts of people. During their talk Blomkvist had thought that he really could not recall what it was that had made them such friends at school. He remembered Lindberg as a reserved boy, incredibly shy with girls. As an adult he was a successful. . . well, climber in the banking world.
He rarely got drunk, but that chance meeting had transformed a disastrous sailing trip into a pleasant evening. And because the conversation had so much an echo of a schoolboy tone, he did not at first take Lindberg's story about Wennerstrom seriously. Gradually his professional instincts were aroused. Eventually he was listening attentively, and the logical objections surfaced.
"Wait a second," he said. "Wennerstrom is a top name among market speculators. He's made himself a billion, has he not?"
"The Wennerstrom Group is sitting on somewhere close to two hundred billion. You're going to ask why a billionaire should go to the trouble of swindling a trifling fifty million. "