COPENHAGEN LETTER:An expenses scandal brought an abrupt end to the fairytale career of the 'King of Farum', writes CLARE MacCARTHY
BROADLY SPEAKING, Danes are not the flamboyant sort. Their instinct is to blend into the background rather than risk getting burned in the spotlight.
There are, of course, exceptions and Peter Brixtofte, who first came to national attention as the mayor of Farum, a dreary commuter town 20km outside Copenhagen, is a particularly exuberant example.
Clever and congenial, Brixtofte transformed his depressing concrete-clad municipality into a model of modernity and progress. His efforts as mayor gave Farum a record-breaking success rate in getting immigrants off the dole and into jobs.
Ten years ago, every single kid in the community was given a brand new personal computer; Mums and Dads spent happy evenings at cultural and sports events at a glittering new stadium; and old-age pensioners got a free Mediterranean holiday every year. No kidding. They really did.
But please hold on before you start packing your bags and emigrating to Farum. The fairytale is over – Farum is broke and administratively merged into another municipality and Brixtofte is en route to prison.
On Tuesday this week, Copenhagen's high court confirmed a ruling from a lower court sentencing Brixtofte to two years inside on charges of being flaithiúlachwith expenses.
It was not for nothing that Brixtofte earned the epitaph “King of Farum”. During the latter years of his 16-year reign, his mayoral office was virtually relocated to the bar of Sepp’s Cafe, a restaurant with a panoramic view of the new sports arena. Here, he would hold court long into the night with cronies and confidants, planning and plotting new ways to keep his Camelot on course. All his chums were royally treated.
According to the charge sheet read out in court this week, the bill for a party of six one March evening ran to €8,466. This included four bottles of wine at €1,175, three at €1,165 and one at €75 (one wonders if they even bothered to drink the last one).
The bill, of course, went straight to the taxpayer. There were many such summits at Sepp’s Cafe. The total bill for unreasonable booze, food and travel expenses was €241,806.
In addition to the expense-account fiddling, Farum’s fallen king faced a clatter of other charges.
He has already served a two-year sentence for gross dereliction of duty in his management of municipality accounts. Brixtofte had a penchant for sports and arranged to overpay a construction firm €1.2 million, which was then handed over to the Ajax-Farum handball club as “sponsorship”.
Brixtofte’s defence in the expenses fraud was that there were no set guidelines on entertainment costs. Spending over €1,000 on a bottle of wine, he said, was a matter of morality to be judged by the voters and not the courts. This cut no ice with the Danish judiciary. Though the court did acknowledge that Brixtofte’s crime was not committed for personal gain, they said the sheer excess of his wining and dining justified a lengthy jail term.
In an unusually blunt statement, the court also referred to Brixtofte’s “stubbornness in setting himself above the law” in a manner that was “detrimental to democracy”.
The court further ruled that Brixtofte must repay the expenses as well as court costs. All in all, he faces a bill in the region of €1.6 million and, as things stand, he would need several lifetimes to pay this off.
His house has been sold, his wife has left him and he has been turfed out of the Liberal Party where he was once a leading light and, briefly, minister of taxation.
However, he has not been stripped completely bare. His two pensions from the mayoralty and parliament give him €105,000 a year. The Danish sense of decency and fair play means that the authorities will chase a hefty chunk of this, ultimately leaving him just sufficient to feed and clothe himself.
It is a truly ignominious end for a politician who was once the poster boy for progress. But perhaps the saddest aspect is that Brixtofte still cannot see that he did anything wrong.
“I was only working for the common good,” he said this week before instructing his lawyers to prepare a supreme court appeal.