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CRIME

Swedish man gets 10 years in jail for opium

A 51-year-old man from Umeå in northern Sweden was sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated drug crimes involving 4 kilogrammes of opium, local media reported on Friday.

Swedish man gets 10 years in jail for opium

The prosecution had pushed for a 14-year prison sentence, but the man demonstrated extraordinary candor during the investigation of the crime, newspaper Västerbottens Folkblad reported on Friday.

Police were able to solve the crime thanks to the man’s cooperation. As a result, Umeå district court gave him a shorter sentence.

The man was originally arrested for being under the influence of narcotics last month. Police later found several grams of opium in his home, but he tipped them off about a lot more under the sink, where they found two packages of the drug weighing a total of kilogramme.

The man also revealed that he regularly buys and sells opium to customers in Umeå, the report said. In addition, police found a bag in the apartment with 712,000 kronor ($100,000).

Based on the amount of money in the bag and the street price of opium, the prosecution concluded that the man had sold three kilogrammes of the drug, a judgment shared by the district court, the report said.

At the trial on December 29th, the man said that he has never engaged in the sale of drugs and claimed that he was keeping the recovered funds for another person. He added that he does not smoke opium himself due to medical reasons, the newspaper reported late last year.

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MONEY

Sweden’s major banks cut rates on variable mortgages

The central bank's decision to lower the main interest rate on May 8th has led all four of Sweden's major banks to follow, dropping rates on variable mortgages.

Sweden's major banks cut rates on variable mortgages

In what will come as a relief for many Swedish homeowners, Sweden’s central bank announced on May 8th that it was cutting the key interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.75 percent – the first cut in eight years.

Sweden’s four major banks – Nordea, Swedbank, Handelsbanken and SEB – responded by lowering rates on their variable rate mortgages by the same amount, 0.25 percentage points.

That means that Nordea’s new list rate – the maximum rate offered for new mortgages, with no discounts taken into account – will be 5.74 percent from May 10th.

Swedbank will be lowering its list rate by 0.25 percentage points to 5.69 percent, although there’s bad news, too: the bank is lowering interest rates for saving accounts by 0.20 percentage points.

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Handelsbanken’s new list rate will be the same as Swedbank’s: 5.69 percent.

“We’re continuously following these developments and are constantly adapting our offering to remain competitive in the long term,” county head of Handelsbanken Stockholm, Mikael Romert, said in a press statement.

Länsförsäkringar is also lowering its rates on variable term mortgages to 5.69 percent, a drop of 0.25 percentage points.

State-owned SBAB is not planning on lowering its rate, although product manager Lars Lindmark pointed out that the bank has lowered rates by around 30 percentage points since December last year.

“In that respect, we’ve pre-empted this announcement by the central bank,” he said. “We’ll have to see what happens. We’ll look at the interest rate market and how our competitors are reacting.”

“Having said that, further rate drops are never ruled out.”

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