The 20 most indebted people in Sweden together owe the state ten billion kroner, according to a compilation made by the Siren news agency.
Three of them are well known, but many are new to the list.
– The mobile mess and all the tax investigations surrounding it led to a sharp increase in the number of large debts in a relatively short time, says Davor Vuleta, an analyst at Kronofogden, to Siren.
Over 400,000 Swedes have debts with the Kronofogden. The median debt is approximately SEK 80,000, including for consumer loans, tax and maintenance support.
At the top of the debt mountain, the debts are significantly higher.
The person who owes absolutely the most is Bengt Ågerup, who became a multi-billionaire on, among other things, anti-wrinkle creams, and who hid his profits in tax havens.
He has lived abroad since the end of the 1990s and said last autumn to SVT’s Mission review that he was therefore not liable for tax in Sweden – and that Sweden has incorrectly taxed him for an “internal business transaction”.
Currently, he owes over one billion kroner.
The porn king
Another person on the top list is Berth Milton Jr., who took over his father’s failing porn company Private Media Group in 1990. Eleven years later, he was one of Sweden’s richest people, with assets of three billion.
In 2010, he was forced out of the company after a turbulent time where he made heavy financial losses.
He has also tried – and failed – to become a dominant owner in AIK.
Milton owes almost SEK 508 million.
The pension cheat
A little higher on the list is Max Serwin, one of the main men in the Falcon funds mess – a scandal that was exposed by Kalla fakta on TV4 in 2016, where 21,000 pension savers lost more than a billion kroner.
Serwin has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for gross fraud and gross infidelity against the principal. He was sentenced to pay back hundreds of millions of kroner, but 64 million have not been found.
His debts with the Crown Bailiff amount to over SEK 611 million.