{ "id": "1997-october-busted-tracking-bankruptcy", "slug": "1997-october-busted-tracking-bankruptcy", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-october-busted-tracking-bankruptcy.html", "year": 1997, "month": "October", "monthNum": 10, "headline": "Busted Tracking bankruptcy", "kicker": "", "author_name": "Stefan Lisinski", "author_title": "Reporter", "affiliation": "Dagens Nyheter", "summary": "An investigation into bankruptcy abuse in Sweden reveals it as a tool for economic criminality, highlighting challenges in proving cases and detailing involved business networks.", "keywords": [ "bankruptcy", "Sweden", "economic criminality" ], "topics": [ "Business & Economy", "Investigative Methods", "Crime & Justice" ], "technologies": [ "Access" ], "full_text": "How do you tell a story about bankruptcy as a tool for economic criminality? A lot of people, at least in Sweden, know that bankruptcy is a business itself with a lot of criminality, but the trick is to prove it. A lot of people involved in bankrupt companies are suspected, some are prosecuted but only a few are convicted for economical criminality. I tried to do the story by starting at the other end. I made a top list and investigated the people who are involved in the biggest number of bankrupt companies. I could show that a lot of them had never actually ran the companies. I could describe the methods they were using. Criminals or not, that was for the courts to decide, but the reader got a picture of companies where the basic idea was not to sell anything but to fool the authorities and other companies. The story was published Oct. 1996 in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest morning newspaper. Story behind the story For Swedish reporters the story about how I did the story was just as interesting as the story itself. This was one of the first times a reporter could use data from a Swedish authority and run it in his own computer. Reporters in my country are used to getting information from authorities, but only on paper. Every citizen has a right to read most of the documents that you can find at the authorities, both local and national. But when you get to computers we have rules that look like a joke. When I asked the Swedish company register for information on discs about all Swedish joint- stock companies that filed bankruptcy during one year, they told me I first needed permission. After four months, the Swedish Computer Inspection Authority said Okay. They had trouble before when a reporter asked for permission to write a book on a computer and they found that this was against the law! At that time the Swedish government decided that this was a question of freedom of the press and gave permission. This decision helped me and I was one of the first reporters to get this kind of information on discs. This also explains why one of the first CAR stories in Sweden was about economic criminality. The Swedish company register knows how to use computers and they are used to selling information to other authorities and market companies. Other authorities don't understand what you are talking about, and they don't know that they are allowed to provide electronic information. I guess in a few years this will change. More Swedish reporters will ask for more electronic information and the authorities have to be taught to give us the information. The war has just started. Crunching the data For one year there were more than 18,000 bankrupt companies with about 50,000 members of the boards. The information was 43 megabytes. The newspaper had to pay about $2,000 for the information. The company registers argued that they had to create a program to sort out the bankrupt companies. I used Access, simply because my newspaper already had it, and I didn't think much about other alternatives. The computer work was quite easy, even if I had to learn the program from start. The problem was that I got a lot of different ideas from the data, and I had to realize that I couldn't make a story of all of the ideas. I got a list of people involved in 10 or more bankruptcies. Total there were 13 people. Then I started the old-fashioned research work, looking into documents from courts, trustees reports interviews, etc. This took a long time and had little to do with CAR work. A big part of the story was to make a description of all these 13 people. Most of them were anonymous in the story. Of the 13 people there were seven who were what we call goal keepers. These were drug addicts, thieves and people with no money at all. They had been put in the companies when it was time for bankruptcy. Eleven of 13 were involved in police investigations. Only two were entrepreneurs who had failed in business. I published an interview with one of them. Most of the people were in their 40s, 12 were men and 12 also were of Swedish origin. This was important since there is a lot of discussions about immigrants and criminality. I also found some new interesting examples of economic criminality. We found a lot of accountants who were involved in hundreds of bankruptcies. Some of them were about to lose their permission to work as accountants. The conclusion was that there is a lot of economic criminality in bankruptcies and that this is a profitable criminality with a good chance for the criminal to go free. One disappointment was that I couldn't find the big guys behind the goal keepers.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "pre-v2", "extracted_at": "", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1998-july-the-week-long-bankruptcy-series-focused-on-the-following-questions", "score": 0.337 }, { "slug": "2005-septemberoctober-database-answers-bankruptcy-questions", "score": 0.319 }, { "slug": "2002-march-april-money-in-and-from-the-bank", "score": 0.224 }, { "slug": "1998-july-booming-or-busting-rising-bankruptcies", "score": 0.174 }, { "slug": "1996-april-economic-analysis-on-the-fly", "score": 0.098 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-october-busted-tracking-bankruptcy.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-october-busted-tracking-bankruptcy.json" }