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Norwegian morality play demonstrates state ineptness in boardrooms.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

For those who missed it: This past Easter in Norway a tussle erupted between one of the country's leading industrialists/robber barons, Kjell Inge Røkke, and the socialist/labour government.

Only one year previous, the two got in bed together when the government invested in Røkke-run Aker Solutions. Røkke had made clear to Jens Stoltenberg and other huns of the labour party that their investment would secure Norwegian industry, and protect it from ruthless foreign investors. Stoltenberg and his government did as they were told, hastily and ineptly buying into the house of Aker.

Then Røkke did as he so often had done before; he screwed the minority shareholders. This April Røkke and Aker Solutions decided that the company would buy another Røkke-owned entity for an outrageous price. This would basically make Røkke much richer, and the state much poorer. So much for the ruthless foreign investors.

The government, via its proxy the Norwegian minister of trade and industry Sylvia Brustad and her shill on the board of Aker Solutions Berit Kjøll, squealed and cried when first stock analysts and then the media laid bare the monstrous deal foisted on taxpayers. As a matter of fact, yes, Røkke had sunk his proboscis deep into the fatty part of Norway's wealth and sucked his fill, but, no, the government had no means to stop him. It had signed a train-wreck of a contract with the company one year ago.

The travesty a fait accompli, we taxpayers could hardly count the damage; we'll see it sure enough come tax time.

Dagens Næringsliv summed it all up with two photographs.

The first shows four henchman of Røkke emerging from the meeting that concluded the whole affair. This is the pick of the school of high finance litter. They are the besuited global industrialists who make their livings out of commas and spreadsheets. These guys enter a fight with post-Communist apparatchiks and come out on top. They'll win a profit at the tip of their Mont Blanc fountain pens just as their predecessors, the crusaders, would have skewered a Muslim innocent at the tip of their lance. After this crime, they'll plot how to screw their siblings out of the family vacation home. Wretched they may be, but they don't lose. The newspaper's headline: "The Victors".

The second spread in Dagens Næringsliv shows another photograph, just as large as the first, and here again, with four subjects. Other than that, though, it couldn't be more different. It is Minister Brustad with her closest advisors. There she is, in all her petty splendour, standing pigeon-toed and mid-snort on some street corner of Oslo. This woman is where she is today because she could better shame the working mothers of the kindergarten classes than anyone else. To her immediate right, her top political advisor, who - by all appearances - failed out of hairdresser's school, then failed her way up the ladder. Brustad's communications advisor has all the unstudied malapropism of a the underdeveloped male first-grade teacher. The fourth, well, he should have remained a farmer. I don't remember the headline, but it could just as well have said, "The Vanquished".

Alas this is the game in a place where the provincial governors think they're still dealing with the Main Street merchantmen and the businessmen skirt mores like borders. Hell, they're all from the same family tree anyway.

To tax-payers worldwide who are hollering for government to step in to save them from bloodthirsty financiers, beware. You know not what you ask for.