Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

 

Svendborg Harbour, Denmark 1934
Martin Bloch (1883-1954)
Photo Credit: Ben Uri Collection [CC BY-NC-ND]

The trap was laid in a rented office... For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people - members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians, - trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smajic. They didn't come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be one of them - an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so skilled at laundering money that she'd enabled a couple of billion kroner in financial crime over the previous decade. They called her the Ice Queen, because she showed not a flicker of regret for what she did.

In her office, Smajic's visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power sockets captured it all - footage that was turned into a documentary called The Black Swan. In its surreptitious method and breathtaking  drama, The Black Swan bore all the fingerprints of its director, Mads Brugger, a provocateur who has spent his career searching for bombshells to drop but who had never quite managed it as well as he did here. Denmark's national bird is the Cygnus olor, a swan as white as virtue. The Black Swan, in showing such easy unbridled formulations of crime, blew up Denmark's idea of itself. 

Since airing last May as a five-part series on TV2 Denmark's biggest television network, The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have been either fired or disbarred...

Hamlet - Prince of Denmark
Leonard Lane (b 1964)
Photo Credit: University of Dundee [CC BY-NC-ND] 

Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: "There's a lot of evidence that it's probably even worse here." Norwegian civil servants invited Brugger to Oslo in January to talk to them about money-laundering. All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edge of their societies. "The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road," Brugger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama's notion that "getting to Denmark" is the goal of every modern democracy. "The Black Swan punctured that hallucination," Brugger said. "It was Denmark's red-pill moment...

Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University who studies trust in Danish society, told me that citizens' trust in politicians has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2007. But their trust in fellow citizens has stayed stable. When asked if they can trust  most people, an astonishing 80% of Danes replied in the affirmative. Lawyers, roasted as rogues practically everywhere, enjoy a glowing reputation in Denmark, and the welfare state is revered, as inviolable as a cathedral.

"We're taught from a young age that cheating the system is not something you do, because you end up pissing on everybody," Anne Cortzen, a television presenter and Brugger's sister told me. "Cheating on taxes is one of the most serious crimes you can commit."...

The Black Swan thus invited viewers to dwell on their worst nightmare: a shattering of the trust that underpins not just the smooth functioning of their beloved welfare state but the essence of what makes Danes proud to be Danes...

(Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian, 2025) 

Denmark serves as a great example of a state that, for the most part, is relatively free from domestic corruption. It is also a state that provides free healthcare, free education (including university) and generous unemployment benefits. To pay for this it has one of the highest taxation rates anywhere. The more you earn the more tax you pay. In 2025 it came second in the "happiness" rankings whereas the UK ranks number 20 and the USA, 24. Nordic countries who follow the same social and economic model as Denmark - Finland ranks 1,  Sweden 4, Norway, 7. 

This article underlines the flaws prevalent in all societies where greed and financial corruption by a small minority exists, has always existed and will always exist. What an excellent summation by Anne Cortzen. " We're taught from a young age that cheating the system is not something you do, because you end up pissing on everybody. Cheating on taxes is one of the most serious crimes you can commit."