Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt’s husband, Ola Flem, has been buying and selling shares weekly for a year and a half. It is not a small amount that has been traded for. Most of the shareholdings have been over NOK 50,000 – and many of them have been for several hundred thousand NOK. The shares have been bought and sold through Flem’s investment company Flamo, where Flem has been the sole owner. He has invested the profits from his IT consulting company into Flamo, which in turn has bought mutual funds and individual shares. A bit unbelievable When you look at the frequency and size of the amounts, it appears a bit unbelievable that no warning lights have flashed at either Flem or Huitfeldt. These are not small savers who have shopped a little on a hobby basis. What is perhaps still the strangest thing about both the Huitfeldt case, and the case earlier this summer where Ola Borten-Moe had to resign due to stock trading, is that it has been possible to do it under the radar at all. Would not have been possible Let’s make a comparison with private business and listed companies. If Anniken Huitfeldt had sat in the group management of, for example, listed Equinor, both she and her husband would have had a duty to report in the form of a stock exchange notification every time shares in Equinor had been traded, in accordance with the Securities Trading Act. Those who sit in the management have a duty to report because they “regularly have access to inside information that directly or indirectly concerns the company, and who are authorized to make decisions at management level that affect the company’s future development and business strategy”. The reporting obligation applies to the person themselves and their “relatives”. “Relatives” are defined as spouses or persons living together in a marriage-like relationship, dependent children or other relatives with whom the person has shared a household for at least one year on the date of the transaction. A handbook! The Government, on the other hand, does not have such rules, instead they have a handbook in which it is stated that “political leadership must generally exercise a significant degree of care in their dispositions in the stock market, regardless of the formal limits that follow from the Securities Trading Act. The same applies to those close to politicians”. A handbook! There is therefore no law that states that Ola Flem must report every time he buys and sells shares, even though his spouse is among the people with the most power in this country. Between them, the government disposes of a money bag of around NOK 1,500 billion which must be distributed every year through the state budget. Can tear down values overnight In addition, they determine the framework for the business world, through taxes and various forms of regulation. They can tear down the listed value of entire industries overnight, through, for example, the introduction of a new tax. As they actually did with the salmon tax in autumn 2022. This is what is called politics. It is completely incomprehensible that the rules for the ownership of ministers and their relatives are not stricter than they are. Even scabby journalists and sleazy lawyers, if they want to be at a certain level, have stricter rules than that. Should ministers be able to trade actively in shares with the knowledge and power they have? The answer should be simple.
ttn-69
Completely incomprehensible that this is not stricter – Statement
