The prosecutor is asking for five years and six months in prison, respectively, for a business owner from Hamar, and four years and six months for a former IT manager in Tana, after the fraud case that has gone to court in Hamar this week. This is one of the biggest corruption cases in a Norwegian municipality ever. The former IT manager and business owner has been charged with gross corruption and gross financial infidelity. Both have pleaded guilty and claim they intended to stop the fraud before the police arrested them. But the fraud lasted for ten years without being detected. 21 million municipal kroner ended up in private pockets. The claim from the prosecutor is that the two defendants must now pay back these 21 million to Tana municipality. Defenders Gøran Møller-Christiansen (left) and Vidar Zahl Arntzen say their clients cheated to finance gambling addiction. Photo: Lars Erik Skrefsrud / news Explanation, no apology Prosecutor Thorbjørn Klundseter said in his final procedure that this case has provided an insight into something most people have heard about, but few of us have any experience with ourselves. With that, he refers to fraud and corruption on a large scale. – It is difficult to understand that you can spend so much money over time and to an extent that we have heard and seen here. The amounts are so large that they will exceed what most of us have in salary. Not only that – it has gone beyond friends, family and workplace, Klundseter said. Throughout the trial, it has been explained how the two defendants both suffer from gambling addiction. – Both of them have had the disorder and it has been driving why it has gone so wrong. But that is just an explanation for the reason why it went so wrong, Klundseter said. – But there is no excuse for what has happened. The responsibility lies there, and that responsibility must be taken. Furthermore, the public prosecutor pointed out that there is also no mitigating circumstance that Tana municipality had a particularly poor control over the flow of money in the municipality. – There should be a barrier there anyway. It should have no bearing on whether it is easy or difficult to obtain a dividend. The conditions in Tana municipality should therefore have no bearing on the punishment in this case, Klundseter argued. – It hits a small municipality hard. It’s a lot of money. It creates unrest in the municipality, it creates unrest in the local community. Donald Duck crime On the part of the defense, a large part of the time in court helped to shed light on the two accused men’s gambling addiction. The two deny being greedy or greedy; they say they continued the big scam because they were gambling addicts and needed money. – I think the claim from the prosecutor is too strict, says the defense of the Hamar man, Gøran Møller-Christiansen. The same is said by the defender of the former IT manager in Tana, Vidar Zahl Arntzen. – Because there is something other than greed behind it. There is no question of grinding your own cake and running away with large sums of money. Both defenders believe that their clients must be punished in the mildest possible way because they have both confessed and helped to solve the case. In addition, the defenders argue that there is no legal basis for confiscating the money that has been defrauded. – The money has been wasted, there is no money to withdraw, said Gøran Møller-Christiansen. The defender of the Hamar man, Gøran Møller-Christiansen, says there is not a penny left of the 21 million that were swindled from Tana. Photo: Lars Erik Skrefsrud / news – This case is outrageously special. A form of Donald Duck crime. You have a municipality completely without internal control. In the center of this are two people with pathological gambling addiction. – This should have been discovered from the first invoice was sent, said Gøran Møller-Christiansen in his final procedure. Zahl Arntzen explained that the former IT manager takes a different line than the Hamar man when it comes to pointing out the poor inter-control in Tana as a contributing factor to the fraud not being stopped earlier. – The Tana man does not want to say that Tana municipality has any kind of part of the blame in this case. He takes full responsibility. – He has also never downplayed what he has done. He is sincerely sorry for what has happened, says Zahl Arntzen. Vidar Zahl Arntzen defends the former IT manager in Tana. Photo: Lars Erik Skrefsrud / news Burst in tears In 2013, the Hamar man lost 25 million kroner. He told the court that he felt a sense of freedom when he was taken in the late autumn of 2020. – It was a feeling of freedom. It was nice to be put in that cell, he explained in court. When his wife testified and told about how the gambling addiction had gone hard on family life, he burst into tears. She was the one who had to pay bills and keep the family finances in order. She told about an apartment they had had that was forcibly sold. The same thing must have happened with two cars. The wife further said that one of the worst experiences she had had with gambling addiction was once her husband had been so desperate for money that he had stolen 10,000 kroner from his son’s piggy bank. The business manager from Hamar explained in court that bad routines in the municipality made it easy to cheat. Photo: Lars Erik Skrefsrud / news Pathological gambling addiction Medical specialist at Finnmark Hospital, Åshild Larsdotter Vivelid, told the court that the IT manager after the imprisonment has been diagnosed with pathological gambling addiction. It is a disorder that, according to the doctor, leads to frequent recurring episodes of gambling that dominate the patient’s life – in the same way as other addictions. – The diagnosis can be very serious, Larsdotter Vivelid explained. – You can leave the farm, you can lose family and network. She said that when you suffer from such an addiction, you will use the opportunities you have to raise money. – So I do not want to say that he is greedy, I think it is the gambling addiction that has got him here, said the medical specialist about the former IT manager. Agreed to share the money The fraud by Tana municipality became known in November 2020. The police in the Inland had received tips from the Tax Administration after they had looked more closely at the companies of the Hamar man. They discovered that there were suspiciously large cash flows to defendants from Tana municipality. Furthermore, their investigations showed that a large proportion of the invoices from the Hamar man were false. The two defendants are said to have agreed to split the money they cheated equally. However, the police have only managed to track down that 4.2 million kroner has been transferred back to the Tana man. No control The business manager and the IT manager became known when his IT company did a job for Tana municipality. Neither the business manager nor the IT manager could explain in court how the idea of cheating the municipality arose. But it was simple: the IT manager talked to the Hamar man about what he should write on the invoice. He directed the fictitious invoices for goods and services, and the money was paid out. No one checked if the invoices were genuine, or if Tana ever received the goods and services they ordered and paid millions for. No witnesses from Tana Despite the fact that a number of former employees in Tana municipality were initially to testify in the trial, among them the municipality’s former councilor, the public prosecutor chose to dismiss them during the second day of the court. Thus, the question of how the fraud could last for such a long time – without being detected – is not clarified. The reason why the prosecutor dropped all the Tana witnesses was that the two defendants have both pleaded guilty. – The case is sufficiently informed with the explanations we have received from the accused and from the Tax Administration’s witnesses, said Thorbjørn Klundseter. Why the fraud was not discovered in Tana is not part of this trial. – It is clarified how much money has been withdrawn from Tana municipality and how this money has been used afterwards. – So there is no need for additional witnesses, as you see it? – Not as this case stands. Here, there are acknowledgments for all the circumstances to which the indictment applies.
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Prosecutor asks for four and five years in prison in the case where Tana has been defrauded for 21 million kroner – news Troms and Finnmark
