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“So?”
“A few years ago I went down to Poland on some other matter. Our group had di
“That mayor of Lódz 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 Lódz. 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 We
“Wait a second,” he said. “We
“The We
“Well, put it this way: why would he risk his own and his company’s good name on such a blatant swindle?”
“It wasn’t so obviously a swindle given that the AIA board, the bankers, the government, and Parliament’s auditors all approved We
“It’s still a ridiculously small sum for so vast a risk.”
“Certainly. But just think: the We
“Do I? I had a variable-rate mortgage on my apartment when the interest rate shot up five hundred percent in October. I was stuck with nineteen percent interest for a year.”
“Those were indeed the days,” Lindberg said. “I lost a bundle that year myself. And Hans-Erik We
“Cash-flow problems.”
“Exactly. And We
“Don’t say businessman. Call them what you like, but calling them businessmen is an insult to a serious profession.”
“All right, every speculator had cash-flow problems. Look at it this way: We
CHAPTER 2. Friday, December 20
Dragan Armansky was born in Croatia fifty-six years ago. His father was an Armenian Jew from Belorussia. His mother was a Bosnian Muslim of Greek extraction. She had taken charge of his upbringing and his education, which meant that as an adult he was lumped together with that large, heterogeneous group defined by the media as Muslims. The Swedish immigration authorities had registered him, strangely enough, as a Serb. His passport confirmed that he was a Swedish citizen, and his passport photograph showed a squarish face, a strong jaw, five-o’clock shadow, and greying temples. He was often referred to as “The Arab,” although he did not have a drop of Arab blood.
He looked a little like the stereotypical local boss in an American gangster movie, but in fact he was a talented financial director who had begun his career as a junior accountant at Milton Security in the early seventies. Three decades later he had advanced to CEO and COO of the company.
He had become fascinated with the security business. It was like war games-to identify threats, develop counter-strategies, and all the time stay one step ahead of the industrial spies, blackmailers and thieves. It began for him when he discovered how the swindling of a client had been accomplished through creative bookkeeping. He was able to prove who, from a group of a dozen people, was behind it. He had been promoted and played a key role in the firm’s development and was an expert in financial fraud. Fifteen years later he became CEO. He had transformed Milton Security into one of Sweden ’s most competent and trusted security firms.