Jacob Christensen

Minister for Cultural Affairs Cecilia Stegö Chilò resigns: Official press release; report in Dagens Nyheter.

Topic for discussion: Has Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt been injured politically or will the consequence be that the neo-liberal wing of the Conservative Party has managed to castrate itself?

Ironic twist: Yesterday I saw a headline in Süddeutsche Zeitung which declared that three Swedish ministers had resigned because of unpaid licence fees. I mailed SZ and wrote that as of Sunday, only one minister had resigned while two still faced severe criticism.

Well, now SZ has two out of three right. I can note that the two appointments that surprised me the most left the government in less than ten days.

Oh, and now we’re at it: Anna Sjödin takes a break. Tune in next week to see if there are any politicians left in Sweden.

Just to round off Saturday’s notes: Anna Sjödin, the leader of the Social Democratic Youth Federation who was sentenced earlier this week for attacking and abusing a bouncer during a scuffle in and outside a Stockholm pub, today published an open letter on the Youth Federation’s homepage. In the open letter, Ms. Sjödin rejects the court’s conclusions, repeats her accusations against the bouncer and his – to use her words – gang (kumpaner) for constructing and presenting a mendacious version of the events in police investigations and during the court’s hearing and finally, she calls the verdict offending. (See also DN’s version.)

In Other News

The Tsunami Strikes Back

The aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami still haunts Swedish politics. Some weeks ago it was revealed that the Chancery in the late spring of 2005 decided to delete records of phone conversations after 180 days rather than the usual one year. The explanation was that the archiving of the data was questionable from a privacy perspective. Later, however, the Chancery reverted to the old practice of storing data for a year. Allegedly, the server system became unstable when log files were deleted prematurely.

This Friday, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called an unscheduled press conference to announce that a back-up set of data about e-mail traffic had been found in the vaults of the Chancery.

If Mr. Reinfeldt had hoped that this revelation would divert attention from the Borelius scandal, he was wrong: Journalists weren’t too interested in the tapes and Mr. Reinfeldt instead faced a deluge of questions about Ms. Borelius’s economy, especially as the tapes aren’t in a condition where they can be read directly.

Swedish Blinds Instead of an Appartment in Central Stockholm for Ramstedt

If you are in Sweden, you will have seen or heard this piece of news, but it is still worth mentioning: The former HR Manager of the insurance and savings company Skandia, Ola Ramstedt, was sentenced to two years of prison for fraud related to renovation of housing owned by companiy and used by leading executives and their families.

The Skandia scandal is one in a series of stories about leading executives who have succeeded in gaining excessive benefits in cash or in kind from the companies they manage: A Swedish version of the New Gilded Age, so to speak.

Next week, I intend to explain how Anders Borg became Finance Minister. Enjoy your weekend.

Just in case you wondered: I reported that I owned a TV to the Licence Fee Agency when I moved to Sweden back in March 1999. Even then you could do it on the internet.

In political terms, Minister for Cultural Affairs Cecilia Stegö Chilò’s refusal to pay the licence fee seems to have backfired: According to media reports, there has been a rush to register TV ownership during the last week. And there are some pretty high-placed names on the list as well, including the business companion of Crown Princess Viktoria’s boyfriend.

Auch!

That Maria Borelius was appointed Minister for Trade last Friday, was a surprise. That Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt announced her resignation in a radio interview today was not exactly a surprise.

What is interesting to note is that according to Sveriges Radio’s summary of the interview, Mr. Reinfeldt gave the fact that her economy had been publicly questioned and that she had withheld important information for him as Prime Minister as reasons for her resignation. (Actually, what Mr. Reinfeldt says is that he sacked Ms. Borelius).

In her statement published by the Foreign Office, Ms. Borelius on the other hand claims that all relevant information about her economy – save the information about moonlighting nannies – was available in public registers in Sweden. Her resignation was motivated out of consideration to her family life.

Well, yes. Right.

A final observation: Two former leaders of the Conservative Party commented Maria Borelius’s actions during Friday. Carl Bildt couldn’t see anything incriminating while Ulf Adelsohn publicly called for her resignation (the linked article is from Saturday).

It could be a complete coincidence but here is Johan Forssell’s blog-entry about licence fees as retrieved through Google’s cache:

And here is the entry if you click on the direct link:

In case you’ve missed the latest: Forssell used to be the leader of the Conservative Youth Federation, he is now Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s chief of staff at the Prime Minister’s Office and – you’ve guessed it – he hasn’t paid his licence fee either.

My hypothesis is this: Among leading neo-Liberal Conservatives, especially those working in or for the Timbro think tank, it was considered a political act of civil disobedience not to pay licence fees.

Following the change of government this has become a political embarassment as the government’s official policy is to support public broadcasting – in some form.

As a matter of fact, there has been a development in the licence fee case today: The Licence Fee Agency has decided to report Ministers Cecilia Stegö Chilò, Maria Borelius and Tobias Billström to the police for neglecting to pay their fees.

This means that Cecilia Stegö Chilò as Minister for Cultural Affairs could be involved in a court case raised against her by one of the government agencies under her portfolio.

An penalty would be in the form of a fine in addition to payment of the missing fees.

Or at least it is close to being among the best headlines, I’ve seen in a long time.

Andrew Gelman of the Columbia University discusses the strange lack of correllation between “happiness” and suicide rates in the Scandinavian countries under the headline

Sweden is not Finland

I think that Swedes, Finns, Fenno-Swedes as well as Sweden-Finns will be happy to agree in that statement.

And it actually poses an interesting research problem: Why are the Finns happy to kill themselves?

On Thursday the leader of the Social Democratic Youth Federation, Anna Sjödin, was convicted and fined on four charges related to a scuffle in and outside a Stockholm pub this spring.

The politically most piquant part of the story is that Ms. Sjödin was alleged to have called the bouncer “svartskalle” (“blackhead”; one of the most common racist slurs used against immigrants in Sweden) during the brawl. It is this, rather than the conviction or the fine, which is politically damaging.

In a curious twist to the tale, Ms. Sjödin is a former rugby player, while the bouncer, Mr. Babak Jamei, is a trained doctor.

Ms. Sjödin’s lawyer has already announced that she will appeal the conviction to the High Court.

In another court case involving a senior Social Democrat, the mayor of Malmö, Ilmar Reepalu, was cleared of charges for corruption related to a vacation in South Africa paid by a business contact. This case was resolved before the election. The resigning leader of the Social Democratic Party, former Prime Minister Göran Persson, still has to defend himself in a minor case related to a breach of safety regulations related to works on his farm in Södermanland.

In other news, no further instances of unpaid licence fees or moonlighting nannies among government ministers have been reported today.

Oops, that was wrong: Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren initially failed to declare his incomes to the Riksdag after he left parliament in 1998 but revised the declaration on his own initiative after six months. And there was another guy who “forgot” to pay his TV licence fee.

The fun continues: Immigration Minister Tobias Billström and Trade Minister Maria Borelius just discovered that the thing with the big screen that they have in their respective living rooms is called a TV set.

While we are waiting for the formal announcement of who will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Rock’n'roll Litterature, the big news here in Sweden is that two members of the new government have found themselves in hot water.

Minister of Trade Maria Borelius admitted to employing a nanny without paying taxes with the excuse that she wouldn’t have been able to arrange babysitting if she had had to pay the social fees. That was a fine excuse – it could even be used as a supporting argument for the new government’s proposal about tax deductions for services performed in the home – until somebody checked the incomes of Borelius’s husband and discovered that money wasn’t really an issue in the Borelius household. The nannies were employed back in the 1990s and legally the cases are statute-barred.

Minister for Cultural Affairs Cecilia Stegö Chilò had a nanny problem as well but what has really caught the media’s attention is the story that she failed to pay her TV Licence fee for 16 years. Stegö Chilò has lived outside of Sweden for some of that period but she still owes the Licence Fee Agency some 20.000 SEK (? 2000€) and has now agreed to pay the debts to the Licence Agency.

Compared with countries like – say – France or Italy, demands on politicians’ individual morale are fairly high, but in Stegö Chilò’s case much of the adoo is probably not so much about her licence fee as such as about unease in the culture sector about having an “outsider” both in terms of career and political standpoint in charge of the policy area. Stegö Chilò is after all a free-marketeer in a highly clientelistic sector.

More coverage from the broadsheets: DN: “Stegö Chilò betalar tillbaka” (Stegö Chilò pays her debts), SvD: “Det här har skadat oss oerhört” (Head of TV Licence Agency: Incredibly damaging to us), Political commentator Henrik Brors in DN: “Samma nivå som på Sahlin-affären” (Same story as in the Sahlin-affair), Martin Jönsson in SvD: “En krigsförklaring mot public service” (An open declaration of war against public service broadcasting). I’m sure that the tabloids have even more.