Millennium Trilogy

Millennium Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Millennium Trilogy Read Online Free PDF
Author: Stieg Larsson
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
the Wennerström 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 andoptions 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 Strandvägen, a fabulous summer villa on the island of Värmdö, 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 Wennerström 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, Wennerström’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. “Wennerström 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. 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 theirhenchmen had confused AIA with the Swedish
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