from the hip

Iceland, which is currently in an economic meltdown, will be getting  help from its Nordic neighbors. The Danish newspaper Politiken writes that:

Iceland’s Prime Minister has been in contact with his Nordic counterparts ‘for some time now’, according to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Nordic help may be on the way to the beleaguered Icelanders.
The prime minister’s comments came as the benchmark Icelandic index, which has been closed for business for some days, reopened and plummeted a full 76 percent. Trade in Iceland’s three largest banks, which have been taken over by the state, remain suspended.

Elsewhere in the paper, Politiken reports that Iceland will be receiving a borrowing facility for 500 mill. Euro from the Danish national bank. The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, on the other hand, reports that the loan is 400 mill Euro, and that the borrowers are Denmark and Norway, both with 200 mill.

See also:

• Times - Iceland secures €200m from Norway, Denmark
• New York Times - Iceland Turns to Neighbors to Prevent a Collapse

The current Norwegian government is getting more and more attention for their promises, big words and subsequent lack of action. Perhaps they assume that words speak louder than action in today’s media society. However, this may turn out to be a dangerous and wrong assumption.

Bob Geldorf recently visited Norway, to speak at an international conference on trade and peace at the Oslo City Hall. According to Aftenposten, he “praised Norway’s intentions to fight poverty and control global warming, but respectfully suggested that Norway could start by changing some of its own policies at home.

Specifically, Geldorf zeroed in on Norwegian politicians’ tendency to portray the country as a champion of the environment and human rights, at the same time as they consciously block agricultural imports from poor countries and pollute the environment with their oil and gas industry.”

Geldorf is not the first one to note this discrepancy between words and action. I seriously doubt that he well be that last.

A Norwegian agent of the National Security Authority was sentenced in Norway a few days ago for downloading and storing child pornography. He actually did this at work! Aftenposten writes:

The man, who did not have an Internet connection at home, used two years before his arrest in March 2006, sitting in a former NATO bunker in Kolsås and filling 99 CDs with child pornography, involving the abuse of minors as young as four to five years of age.

.. The NSM worker had the highest security clearance at the time, with access to top secret material when arrested.

The NSM’s own control system picked up the abnormal network traffic on their service server, and notified police.

The secret agent actually had compiled a collection of 600 films and 1750 images of hard-core child porn while on the job.

I guess secret agents aren’t all like James Bond after all?!? Sad, sad.

The Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard has created a piece entitled “Margaux Hemingway”. In Norwegian newspapers it is more often referred to as “the vagina arm”.

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The Norwegian shipping magnate John Fedriksen is involved in a fight for control over the US oil rig company Pride. Self-made Norwegian shipping tycoon John Fredriksen has made another move in the rig market. His rig corporation, Seadrill, snatched up 10 percent in American competitor Pride.

Fredriksen is known as a tough businessman, and one of his specialties have been asset play. With the international market for oil rigs in the process of heating up, and with prices hitting record levels recently, this recent play from Fredriksen seems to make sense. But he is also building up an empire of companies worldwide, most of them involved in shipping and oil.

Houston-based Pride International, is worth about USD 6,8bn, while Seadrill has a market value of about USD 12,5 billion. Aftenposten (Norway) brings the following comment:

“Seadrill has had the ambition to become the world’s largest rig company,” said analyst Kjetil Bakken in Fondsfinance to E24.

“If they are successful in buying Pride, they’ve come further. A merged company would become the second largest in the world, ahead of Diamond and after Transocean,” said Bakken.

Reuters writes that Seadrill views the share purchase in Pride as a financial investment.

Seadrill declined to comment on whether the move was a step towards a takeover of Pride.

Yet another wolf missing in Norway, writes the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

The wolves kill sheep, and many ranchers in Norway are extremely upset by the protection of the wolves. Conservationists fear that she has been killed by increasingly radical ranchers who want to see wolves wiped out. However, now police and conservationists are teaming up to hunt the illegal hunters.

The racnhers, or their associates, have also been reported to harass reseachers studying the wolves. When researcher Kenneth Larsen at Hedmark University College in Elverum returned to his car after a week studying the wolves, on a lonely forest road near Hafsjøen, he found three of his four tires slashed.

In a recent study reported by Aftenposten last week, wolf researchers claimed that half of the deaths of Scandinavian wolves during the past year are blamed on illegal hunting.

The minister of justice in Norway has proposed criminalizing the purchase of sexual services. The law proposes imposing fines and up to six months in jail for anyone convicted of paying a prostitute for sex. The law is in line with a “Sex Purchase Law” passed by neighboring Sweden in 1999, which has been the subject of intense interest in Europe and elsewhere.

Justice Minister Knut Storberget said in presenting the proposed law: “People are not a commodity and criminalizing the purchase of sex would make it less attractive for human traffickers to look to Norway.”

I am not sure I like the law. I don’t really know how smart it is to criminalize people for buying sex. But at least that part of the law I respect. The part I have strong objections to, is the part that says that the law should apply to Norwegians visiting other countries as well. This is strange as a legal principle.

I mean, if a Norwegian drive a car at 160 km/hour on a German highway, this is legal in Germany but illegal in Norway. But people do not get punished for it when they return home to Norway. Same for smoking cannabis in Amsterdam. And so on. But now the government proposes that when a Norwegian does something in a foreign country that is legal in that country, he is to be punished when he returns home?

And, in addition to the very strange legal principle involved, there is also the almost impossible situation with respect to implementation. Are Dutch policemen supposed to look out for Norwegians buying sex, when that purchase is legal in the Netherlands? And the same in other countries, of course.

So, seems to me, the only people who will be punished for this are the ones admitting to have done it - some honest guys - and people who are informed about by friends that can’t be trusted or enemies, and then some few others more or less randomly.

To me it seems strange and not very smart to put in place a law that punishes the honest and rewards informers. Is that how the socialist government in Norway wants Norway to become?

Shipowner John Fredriksen is publicly acclaimed as Norway’s richest man.

John Fredriksen who built up his own wealth from nothing, continues to dominate the top of the list of the richest Norwegians. He now has a net worth reported to be NOK 55.5 billion (USD 10 billion) by the magazine Kapital.

Fredriksen is 63 years old and proud of hailing from a working class neighbourhood on Oslo’s east side. Through his investment companies Hemen Holdings and Meisha, Fredriksen controls the companies Frontline and Golar LNG from his £100 million Chelsea home in London. He also has major interests in the oil rig operator SeaDrill, the fish farming company Marine Harvest and the dry bulk company Golden Ocean Group. Fredriksen also recently announced that he through acquisitions and options and secured 9,6% of the worlds largest shipholding company Overseas Shipholding Group. (Source: Wikipedia).

When I say publicly acclaimed, the reason is that actually he is no longer a Norwegian citizen. He’s officially a citizen of Cyprus, after turning in his Norwegian passport in protest over Norway’s tax system.

However, Norwegian media as well as Norwegian politicians like to talk as if he was still Norwegian. For the politicians that may be a way to pretend that all is well and fine and, thus, avoid having to face challenges to the taxsystem that has recently driven both him and several others of the richest men in Norway out of the country, into tax exile.

Billionaire Norwegian shipowner and businessman John Fredriksen has placed one of his twin daughters, Kathrine Fredriksen (see picture), on the board of his major stocklisted tanker firm Frontline Ltd. Her sister, Cecilie Fredriksen, already sits on the board of another Fredriksen-controlled company, the Oslo-based collection agency Aktiv Kapital.

“He’s a modern-day Onassis. The tanker king. He landed squarely in the sweet spot of the tanker cycle, with the largest fleet of ships.” In 2001 an article on Forbes.com described him as having “a tanker fleet bigger than anything Aristotle Onassis ever had.”

Simultaneously, John Fredriksen is seemingly launching a media campaign to promote his daughters in Norwegian media. While I don’t know this for sure, the articles presenting his beautiful daughters Kathrine and Cecilie has all the marks of a professional PR-campaign on them. They appear at roughly the same time in several papers each time, and the content is similar.

The two young ladies are presented as savvy business-women. While I think it is wonderful that John Fredriksen is teaching his daughters business, I think perhaps the PR firm may be overstating the case a little, perhaps in order to please Mr. Fredriksen. While they may be talented, they are still a little too young for the heroic role assigned in some of the articles.

One of Norway’s largest newspapers, Dagbladet, today implicitly accuses Norway’s Prime Minister, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, of having dished out false promises for 20 years about men’s rights to a paid leave following child births. This is an issue of great concern to many in Norway working for greater equality between men and women.

Every third father, approximately, does currently not have this right in Norway. Men only get this if the mother of the child has worked during six of the ten last months preceding the birth of a child.

The newspaper accuses Stoltenberg very smartly, without actually stating it explicitly, by publishing two news articles side by side on the internet version of the newspaper. One of the articles contains an interview with Mr. Stoltenberg dating from March 1987, 20 years ago. There, as a young and rising star in the Norwegian Labor Party, he strongly argues in favor of men’s right to a paid leave following child births is a very important issue.

The second article, posted right next to the first, states that time is running out for Stoltenberg. While not commenting itself, Dagbladet lets a veteran-member of the Labor Party in Norway, Britt Schultz, say that this reform is overdue, and that there has been a lot of symbol-politics about this, but that symbolic politics do not produce results. Even without comments from the paper itself, this seem to be a pretty strong statement by the paper.

So. There it is. 20 years of talk and no action. That’s a lot of talk.

Nicely done by Dagbladet. Actually.