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.