THE USED CLOTHES TROPHY (part 1)

Berlingske Tidende,(from TvindAlert) August 24th 2002
By Michael Bjerre

 

As the arrested Tvind founder Mogens Amdi Petersen is heading home to be tried for embezzlement, Tvind’s international trade is running as ever. Berlingske on Sunday can report today how Tvind, supposedly helping the poor of the Third World, is defrauding people who act in good faith by dropping their used clothes into Tvind’s collection bins, all over Europe. Through a network of secret companies, hidden in the Netherlands, Ireland and in the British tax haven Jersey, Tvind has been collecting millions from the sale of used clothing for at least the last ten years.

 

Amsterdam

The small man with the greying hair points determinedly toward the main entrance: “I have nothing to tell”, he snarls.
The man’s name is Flemming Gustafsson and has been for many years one of Tvind’s leading businessmen. The 59-year-old Dane stands behind the main entrance to the office in the grey and drab building, next to a lively main road in the provincial town of Maarsen, south-east of Amsterdam.

It is rather difficult to imagine that this building should be the location for one of Tvind’s largest and shyest businesses in Europe. From this location Tvind secretly betrayed for at least ten years all the well-meaning Europeans who thought the surplus of selling the clothes donated to Tvind would help the poor in the Third World, as Tvind promised. Instead Tvind channeled all the money through their secret companies into their own accounts.

Tvind even doesn’t make a distinction in this practice with their offices. Only a handwritten note gives away that the company “Conmore” resides in this building in the sleepy Dutch province.

Flemming Gustafsson’s limited hospitality might have something to do with him playing a central part in Tvind’s big used-clothing trophy.

“Is there anything sensible to light going on in the companies you’re involved with”, Sunday Berlingske asks while on the way back outside.

“There is something wrong with the newspapers in Denmark”, Flemming Gustafsson answers sharply and adds: “I want you to leave this office. NOW!”

Now there may be several reasons for Flemming Gustafsson to refuse to share details about his daily work with the public.
First, Tvind has never before been under such a high pressure, becoming clear lately, as the founder Mogens Amdi Petersen, after a half year in the rough American jails, yielded and accepted to return home to Denmark. Here he and seven other Tvind leaders are accused of embezzlement and tax fraud for 75 million Danish crowns.

Secondly, Flemming Gustafsson himself is accused of a white-collar-crime in Belgium. He and seven other Tvind leaders are facing a trial for money laundering from about 23 million Danish crowns, the details being undisclosed by the Belgian police.

Thirdly, there is questioning for Tvind’s trading companies that Flemming Gustafsson would like to avoid. Noticing how the companies were the gear-wheels in an extremely clever system of deceiving the donators of the used clothes and the poor in the Third World who were to profit, Flemming Gustafsson’s rejection makes sense. Thus Sunday Berlingske can reveal what up till recently used to be one of Tvind’s largest frauds.

The fraud is based on the fact, that Tvind’s humanitarian organizations in Western Europe – UFF and Humana – only receive a fraction of the profit from the sale of the clothes deposited in their collection bins.

Instead, they sell them officially to a Tvind company in Holland, which in turn sells them to Tvind’s companies, for example in the British tax haven of Jersey, earning the profit by selling them at far higher prices in Eastern Europe.

This way the largest part of the profits can be collected in Tvind’s own accounts and not into the accounts of UFF or Humana, which in turn have far less to give to the Third World as might be achieved originally.

In order to understand the structure and the background of Tvind’s economic ‘used-clothes-laundering’ we have to turn back the time to a historic date. It is November 9th, 1989; the iron curtain separating Europe falls.

The party in Berlin seems to never end. Champagne corks pop everywhere, people saluting each other and a wave of happiness and relief rolls over the European continent.

But for some the new time is something else than just a party. In some distance to the events, Tvind’s supreme leaders, led by Mogens Amdi Petersen, begin to make new plans for their business. They consider Eastern Europe to be a whole new market to wash money into their tanks, and so Amdi, shortly after the iron curtain fell, accepted the plan for a large campaign, as sources close to the leaders for some years, explain.

Amdi’s plans are to erect an international business empire to secure Tvind’s further expansion, at some time in the 80’s he already came up with a plan for something he called “money-earning activity”.

The pedagogic project, started out in the 70’s as a revolutionary movement with educational trips in rumbling buses and almost-sinking ships, was now to use the methods of capitalism to reach their goal.

Eastern Europe fitted perfectly for that strategy. These countries are an extremely good market for a good with which Tvind’s storage facilities are almost overflowing with – used winter clothing.

In 1989 Tvind had been collecting used clothing in some European countries for a couple of years already. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland they collected under the name “Ulandshælp fra Folk til Folk” (UFF) [Development Aid from People to People]. In England, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Austria they resided as ‘Humana People to People’.

But a substantial part of the used clothing people dropped into the yellow and green collection bins were warm winter clothes, which for obvious reasons were unsuitable for use in Africa.

Unlike Africa, Eastern Europe is perfect for the sale of these clothes. As always, whenever Tvind is under way with great plans, the so-called ‘distribution group’ hunts for possible keynote themes in the Teacher’s Group.

This ‘distribution group’ is made up of Mogens Amdi Petersen and his girlfriend Kristen Larsen, and shortly after, as Tvind-informants report; they had selected a number of trustworthy employees, who had proven well in business before, for the job at hand.

One of those is Flemming Gustafsson.

On September 3rd, 1992 Flemming Gustafsson founded the company ‘E.C. Trading’ in Holland. Gustafsson is the only shareholder of the company. Later all shares are taken over by a Kirsten Kristiansen. And later yet, they are taken over by Poul Laurits Jørgensen.

The changing of the stockholders is only trying to conceal the relations to Tvind, as several Tvind-informants report for Sunday Berlingske.

Flemming Gustafsson is not the only one of the three who has been a long-time-member of the Teachers Group. Kirsten Kristiansen has been with Tvind for 30 years, at first as a teacher for the traveling folk high school, later as coordinator for the container transports of the used clothes.

Poul Laurits Jørgensen – inside Tvind called ‘Poul junior’ as not to be confused with the Tvind spokesman Poul Jørgensen – has been with Tvind for 20 years, most of the time with UFF.

Even though E.C. Trading is a Tvind company, there is a reason for Tvind to keep this a secret. E.C. Trading’s main task is to buy used clothing collected by UFF and Humana all over Western Europe.

By cooperating closely, there is the opportunity to channel away a great part of the funds collected by the humanitarian national sections of UFF and Humana supposed to be distributed to Tvind’s projects in the Third World.

And this is exactly what’s happening.

E.C. Trading is, as mentioned before, just a stopover in Tvind’s great eastern European fraud. E.C. Trading sells the larger part – about 85 percent – to five other Tvind companies, four of them hidden in Jersey, the British tax haven.

Low Taxes are not the only advantage of the Jersey addresses. Here you can hide everything from key numbers to staff members, as there is no need to supply that information to the authorities.

Sunday Berlingske came into possession of documents about those four companies – Holland House, Holland Trading, Holland Enterprise and World Wide Suppliers.

Member of the board of directors of all these companies is Birgitte Larsen. She is not just somebody. For years she played a central part in leading the Tvind economy. From the Tvind headquarters at Grindsted she looked after the private economy, the issuing of tax cards and the pocket money for all the members of the Teachers Group, who all had signed up for the “mutual economy”.

But now it is her job to channel the profits from the Jersey companies to the secret accounts. This doesn’t happen physically on the green British Island, but from an equally secret Tvind office located on Mill Lane 28 in the tax haven of Gibraltar.

As the day-by-day leader of Tvind’s tax haven companies Birgitte Larsen soon gets many other tasks. Tvind’s decision to venture into the eastern European market proofs to be a great success.

East European people are going crazy for the modern western-style clothes. Unlike when they had to spend a month’s paycheck to buy some used Levi’s at the black market, they can now buy used brand clothing for a reasonable price.

The buyers let the Jersey phones ring all day long. Actually though the calls were rerouted by answering machines to E.C. Trading in Holland, and in their Amsterdam office the order forms are filled out, too, as former Tvind workers point out to Sunday Berlingske. The demand is so high that E.C. Trading sometimes almost can’t satisfy it. In a steady stream trucks filled with used clothing pull away from one of the 37 loading ramps in the 200 meter long building housing the sorting facility heading toward Eastern Europe.

The same thing happens in England, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden and wherever else in Europe Tvind is collecting clothes. E.C. Trading even picks up clothing from UFF’s large sorting facility in Ballerup near Copenhagen and in Århus, as several hundred freight bills possessed by Sunday Berlingske prove.

 

 

PART TWO