<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/27/black-swan-denmark-documentary-mads-brugger-amira-smajic>
"The trap was laid in a rented office: two rooms in downtown Copenhagen,
furnished without a whisper of Scandi style. If it wasn’t for a Frida Kahlo
print on one wall, the premises might have felt as impersonal and stark as a
confessional. That, in any event, was what it became. For six months, beginning
in mid-2022, a parade of people – members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs,
lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians – trooped through to recount their
sins to Amira Smajic. They didn’t come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be
one of them – an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so
skilled at laundering money that she’d enabled a couple of billion kroner in
financial crime over the previous decade. They called her the Ice Queen,
because she showed not a flicker of regret for what she did.
In her office, Smajic’s visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials
or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth
their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power
sockets, captured it all – footage that was turned into a documentary called
The Black Swan. In its surreptitious method and breathtaking drama,
The
Black Swan bore all the fingerprints of its director, Mads Brügger, a
provocateur who has spent his career searching for bombshells to drop but who
had never quite managed it as well as he did here. Denmark’s national bird is
the
Cygnus olor, a swan as white as virtue.
The Black Swan, in showing such
easy, unbridled formulations of crime, blew up Denmark’s idea of itself.
Since airing last May as a five-part series on
TV2, Denmark’s biggest
television network,
The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One
out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a
biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and
taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under
investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the
minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have
been either fired or disbarred. A new money-laundering law was introduced to
give banks more oversight over “client accounts” – the kind of accounts in
which lawyers pool the funds of several clients and transact on their behalf,
and that featured in many of the machinations in Smajic’s office. In her New
Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister suggested biker-gang criminals ought to
be stripped of their pension rights – a detail so specific it was surely
inspired by
The Black Swan.
Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching
The Black Swan. After
the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned:
“There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.” Norwegian civil
servants invited Brügger to Oslo in January to talk to them about
money-laundering. All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that
crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies.
“The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and
to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the
political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the
goal of every modern democracy. “
The Black Swan punctured that
hallucination,” Brügger said. “It was Denmark’s red-pill moment.”"
Via Fefebot and Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
