When Countries Act as Criminals

When countries act unlawfully as criminals, (which they have always done when the truth is told, just read WikiLeaks) the citizen should take note, especially when we are fortunate enough to live in Europe or the Western world.

The question is: should the government be allowed to do unlawful acts and consequently be allowed to cover this up?

All governments and their departments do commit acts, which are against the current laws of the land. They also seem to be able to cover up such acts, by “adjusting the law” by making new laws and directives – always able to cover their tracks. However, all these politically elected and public civil servants believe that they have the legitimacy to decide what is best, even when they take unlawful actions.

We allow government and civil servants this right to “do what is best for us” like they have the moral and legitimate right, not forgetting the intelligence and expertise to take such actions.

In my own experience, we do allow this; I ran a “democratic” elected organisation and know that when something comes up, you just deal with it. The last thing you do is to ask hundreds or thousands of people, you will simply not be able to act. If you have made a mistake, one tries to sweep it under the carpet or justify it by changing “the rules”.

No doubt that the Danish government was “allowed” to decide that they had to take action against something which partly would affect the established banks, the National Banks directives and currency rules at the time. Moreover, this was a legitimate way for people to hide their black money and possibly take these assets abroad without the control of the authorities since all the rules were not defined at the time.

Furthermore, since the fiscal authorities had not seen the consequence of tax laws concerning investing in commodities and currencies, they had to show that the arm of the law and taxman reaches out to every corner, draws in the land.  Hundreds of tax investigations and successful cases came about because of the closing SCE and my arrest.

I have no difficulty in accepting the above information; my difficulty is partly personal (for all the suffering my family and I had to endure) and on behalf of all the investors which lost out because of the authorities’ unlawful action.

Firstly, authorities “should” try to play by the rules, which is after all, what they themselves are responsible for. Secondly, when injustices have been done and exposed, at some point the government should admit to such errors and call a spade a spade.

Practically always, authorities do not have the spine to do so, partly because it will always mean that they have to admit to their own mistakes made by individual civil servants. With their power domain, they do not tolerate this, since it will usually affect their reputation, the spirit of the system and collegial loyalty.

Worst of all, for the politician, their electability is at stake – so they cover-up, and in most cases succeed, unless the opposition finds out. Just take the Tamil case in Denmark, what really happened to the top civil servants from the Ministry of Justice who had acted unlawfully and criminally – I am sure they enjoy their fat pensions today.

I told the court that I would go on a hunger strike in August 1980; I wanted to release a statement to the press. Judge Claus Larsen did not want this to happen. Part of this statement informed the public about a meeting in the Danish Law Society in the spring of 1980, where the chief for Bagmandspolitiet, Finn Meilby, proudly told an exclusive audience of a few lawyers that Bagmandspolitiet used the same methods against my companies as the police did in Chicago in the 1930’s case (wiretapping, disinformation and agent provocateurs).

The head of the US Supreme Court Chief Judges Louis Brandeis said about such methods: “If the state uses illegal and unlawful methods, it allows the citizens to be contemptuous of the law and take the law into their own hands”. 

“Er De Hauschildt?”

In February 2006, I sat in the British Airways hospitality lounge in Heathrow Airport enjoying a light snack and a glass of champagne together with my life-partner. Our flight to Nice had been called but we decided to have another glass of champagne since we always went late to the plane.

Just as a stewardess came to us to ask us to board since we had a long walk to the plane, a man came over to me and said: “Sorry” in English, and then asked in Danish “Er De Hauschildt?” (Are you Hauschildt?). In answering yes to the question, the man continued to tell me that his wife recognised me, but he was not quite sure. Since my partner started to pull me away to go to the plane, he said to me: “My wife wants me to tell you that some of us in the Ministry did not like what we did to you.” (nogle af os i ministeriet kunne ikke lide hvad vi gjorde i mod Dem). Hearing this, I immediately asked for his name and card. He lightly shook his head and said: “Even on a senior civil servants pension I have to go quietly through the doors” (gå stille med dørene). At that moment, I started walking away since my partner had left for the aeroplane and we did have a long walk to the boarding gate.

During my walk to the plane, I thought that he might not have necessary referred to the Ministry of Justice, in fact, it could have been the Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Trade and Industry, not to forget the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On the plane, I told my partner what had happened, despite that she always told me to “let sleeping dogs lie” she said that I should produce something on the Internet. To publish a website and to at least put out the truth about what had happened and the injustices, hoping that someone would possibly come forward with the truth. We tried to continue our beautiful life but this would prove to be impossible due to many other developments in the years to follow.

In the past years, I have faced the death of my soul mate-in-life. The death of my wife, the mother to my sons; I am also getting a lot older, and am coming to the end of the road in my journey through this life.  Lately, I have walked the long hard road of sorrow deep in the valley of despair and grief in the cold winter night.

I was fortunate enough in life to have had much love, what’s more, enjoyed true love for many years after the terrible events in Denmark. Love is the most important thing in life.

Life for me today has come to a stage where almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear for embarrassment or failure – falls away in the face of death, leaving what is truly important.

I have never been the same human being again since being in solitary confinement for three hundred and nine days. This solitary confinement affected me very badly; after more than thirty years, I still suffer badly on most days from this torture. My life stopped during that solitary confinement and consequently, I have since lived my life as a very different person.

This fact was one of the main motives of the Danish authorities for everything that happened against my companies and me in 1980. Most politicians and the tax authorities like to tax people, but the fiscal authorities find it difficult when a citizen buys a gold bar or a coin and then just puts it away for a rainy day. The authorities much prefer their people to buy their bonds and debts or invest through the banks, where everything is recorded. This allows the politicians and the civil servants to tax such investments whatever they like.

As a pioneer of investing in precious metal for more than fifty years, I have indeed always been well aware that this type of investment did not suit the tax-happy politician and civil servants since the investor acquired transportable assets out of reach of taxation. Therefore, under communism and in many dictatorships, holding precious metal was strictly illegal and even punishable, as it was in China and Russia, with the death penalty imposed.

As to taxation, we now live in a time where fiscal authorities in Germany and other European countries have been paying criminals for stealing data from Swiss and Liechtenstein banks in order to find out whom of their citizens have not paid tax. Germany even provided these criminals with new identities. Even the Danish fiscal authorities have paid in recent years for data obtained by criminal and illegal means. 

A Bloomberg investigation in 2010 showed how Google had cut its overseas tax rate to just 2.4% using an aggressive avoidance scheme dubbed the “Double Irish, Dutch sandwich” to effectively shuffle revenues made across Europe offshore to places like Bermuda, where the tax rate was zero.