Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [220]
But that evening She on TV4 led off with an eleven-minute summary of the highlights in Blomkvist’s accusations. Berger had lunched with the host several days earlier and given her an advance exclusive.
TV4’s brutal profile scooped the state-run news channels, which did not clamber on to the bandwagon until the 9:00 news. By then the TT wire service had also sent out its first wire with the cautious headline: CONVICTED JOURNALIST ACCUSES FINANCIER OF SERIOUS CRIME. The text was a rewrite of the TV story, but the fact that TT addressed the subject at all unleashed feverish activity at the Conservative morning newspaper and at a dozen of the larger regional papers as they reset their front pages before the presses started rolling. Up until then, the papers had more or less decided to ignore the Millennium allegations.
The Liberal morning newspaper commented on Millennium’s scoop in the form of an editorial, written personally by the editor in chief, earlier in the afternoon. The editor in chief then went to a dinner party as TV4 started broadcasting its news programme. He dismissed his secretary’s frantic calls that there “might be something” to Blomkvist’s claims with these later famous words: “Nonsense—if there were, our financial reporters would have found out about it long ago.” Consequently, the Liberal editor in chief’s editorial was the only media voice in the country that butchered Millennium’s claims. The editorial contained phrases such as: personal vendetta, criminally sloppy journalism, and demands that measures be taken against indictable allegations regarding decent citizens. But that was the only contribution the editor in chief made during the debate.
That night the Millennium editorial offices were fully staffed. According to their plans, only Berger and the new managing editor, Malin Eriksson, were due to be there to handle any calls. But by 10:00 p.m. the entire staff was still there, and they had also been joined by no fewer than four former staff members and half a dozen regular freelancers. At midnight Malm opened a bottle of champagne. That was when an old acquaintance sent over an advance copy from one of the evening papers, which devoted sixteen pages to the Wennerström affair under the headline THE FINANCIAL MAFIA. When the evening papers came out the next day, a media frenzy erupted, the likes of which had seldom been seen before.
Eriksson concluded that she was going to enjoy working at Millennium.
During the following week, the Swedish Stock Exchange trembled as the securities fraud police began investigating, prosecutors were called in, and a panicky selling spree set in. Two days after the publication the Minister of Commerce made a statement on “the Wennerström affair.”
The frenzy did not mean, however, that the media swallowed Millennium’s claims without criticism—the revelations were far too serious for that. But unlike the first Wennerström affair, this time Millennium could present a convincing burden of proof: Wennerström’s own emails and copies of the contents of his computer, which contained balance sheets from secret bank assets in the Cayman Islands and two dozen other countries, secret agreements, and other blunders that a more cautious racketeer would never in his life have left on his hard drive. It soon became clear that if Millennium’s claims held up in a court of appeals—and everyone agreed that the case would end up there sooner or later—then it was by far the biggest bubble to burst in the Swedish financial world since the Kreuger crash of 1932. The Wennerström affair made all the Gotabank imbroglios and Trustor frauds pale in comparison. This was fraud on such a grand scale that no-one even dared to speculate on how many laws had been broken.
For the first time in Swedish financial reporting, the terms “organised crime,” “Mafia,” and “gangster empire” were used. Wennerström and his young stockbrokers, partners, and Armani-clad lawyers emerged like a band of hoodlums.
During the first days of the media frenzy, Blomkvist was invisible.