Sweden’s anti-corruption model facing first criticisms

The Swedes, who for a long time wanted to believe that their country was a model of honesty and was not affiliated to any corruption scandals, are waking up to the scale of a phenomenon they had underestimated.

One of the cases that is currently making headlines: the former leader of the Conservative Party, Anna Kinberg Batra, who was appointed County Governor of Stockholm in March 2023, is accused of having hired at least three of her close friends for highly paid positions, without having sought other candidates - apart from posting an advert in a corridor near her office. "Of course, in retrospect, I understand that it wasn't right", she admitted, responding to criticism from those who called on her to resign.

But after the scandal broke, Ms Kinberg Batra is still in office. The public prosecutor's office responsible for fighting corruption has decided not to open an investigation. According to Olle Lundin, Professor of Public Law at Uppsala University and one of Sweden's leading experts on the subject, the Governor of Stockholm County can sleep well: "In a few weeks' time, everyone will have forgotten about this affair. In the public debate, he is one of the only people who dares to talk about corruption, "because it is corruption and you would say it in any other country", he insists, referring to a "very widespread" phenomenon that has been underestimated for too long and that extends far beyond the petty arrangements between Ms. Kinberg Batra's friends.

This led to a certain wake-up call to the members of the Swedish society. "The problem is that corruption is not part of our self-image. As a result, we don't call corruption what it is, and it's as if it didn't exist", says Mr. Lundin.

In January, Sweden recorded its worst-ever ranking in the Corruption Perceptions Index, carried out annually since 1995 by Transparency International. In sixth place, the Nordic country still remains well-ranked, but its score has never been so low, and, above all, the kingdom has fallen behind its Scandinavian neighbors. In the latest European barometer on public attitudes to corruption, published in May 2023, 36% of Swedes surveyed felt that corruption was "quite ordinary" in their country, compared with 32% in 2022.

When it comes to corruption, the awarding of public contracts is a particularly exposed sector," stresses Professor Olle Lundin. The latest scandal: on 22 March, a radiologist at Uppsala University Hospital was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for taking 5 million kroner (€428,000) in bribes to buy equipment supplied by several companies, whose employees were punished in a variety of ways, ranging from fines to prison sentences.

Back in 2014, in a book entitled The Hypocritical Swede, Louise Brown, former chair of the Swedish branch of Transparency International, warned of the scale of the problem. Since then, she says, it has only become worse: "Today, we are faced with a new kind of corruption, very aggressive, linked to organized crime, and which affects all sectors, from health to driving schools, not forgetting car inspection, waste treatment, finance and even the justice system". She cites, for example, the case of an immigration officer under investigation for selling residence permits and work permits.

Meanwhile, corruption in Sweden doesn’t touch just the public sector, but also the private one according to the Financial Times. As such it was reported in 2023, that the chair of Lazard company in Sweden has been charged with aggravated bribery linked to a takeover of a Swiss company by engineering group Atlas Copco in 2015. Swedish prosecutors claim that Gustaf Slettengren paid a bribe of €138,000 in 2016 to a prominent board member of another corporation for information as part of the sale by the Swiss group of its business to Atlas for €486mn the year before.

Adil Melikov