Does royal family have trust issue over gift list?

When the royal family released a list of gifts it has received throughout this year, the response was one of admiration for the attempt of transparency – but also skepticism because several important parts may have been left out.

The list, released on Wednesday, was the first of its kind to be released by the palace. It included such presents as a sled dog whip, a silk tie, two French hats and several other apparently innocuous items (the whip was presented during a visit to Greenland).

However, the president of anti-corruption charity Transparency International, Jesper Olsen said there were several problems with the list, which covered gifts received by the royal family between February 7th and June 30th.

It does not mean full transparency because there are several conditions that apply, meaning items can be left off the list as well as future ones.

Olsen was critical of the fact that tickets to events are not considered gifts.

“It’s natural that the royal family attends various events for representative purposes. But if they attend privately, there should be transparency if the tickets were a gift. Otherwise, they should pay if it’s not on the list,” he told newswire Ritzau.

“It’s really in the royal family’s own interest to guard against speculation that might happen when there’s not transparency,” he said.

Personal presents from friends and family will also not be included on the list, although the palace has not defined this type of present precisely.

“It’s a grey zone. Of course there should be a private sphere. But the palace also has the issue that the royal couple are friends with high profile people in Denmark’s business sector,” Olsen said.

In the past, the palace has received gifts from business but has now changed that practice and returns presents from companies, it informed Ritzau.

But Olsen said this explanation was not enough.

“A gift from a company should not be given under cover of being a private gift. I’d like to see a better description of what guidelines the palace uses when it says that something is representative or private. That would inspire more trust,” he said.

Copenhagen burns millions of cigarettes to power 3,000 homes

Some 26.5 million illegally-produced cigarettes and 18 tonnes of tobacco were incinerated at the Amager Bakke waste disposal facility in Copenhagen on Friday.

Because the facility directs output from its incinerators into the energy network, the cigarettes will end up providing power to 3,000 homes in the city, according the director of the Amager Resourcecenter (ARC), Jacob Simonsen.

The cigarettes were seized in February from an illegal factory discovered on a farm in western Jutland. The case ended with prison sentences and fines totalling millions of kroner for three of the men behind the enterprise. The heavy fines were related to tax evasion aspects of the crime.

The Tax Agency (Skattestyrelsen) has estimated it lost up to 200 million kroner in taxes as a result of the case. Part of that has now been recovered, in a roundabout way, as free energy: the seized tobacco products, stored in a secret Tax Agency warehouse after the case closed, were on Friday loaded into trucks before being driven to Amager and dumped into the incinerator.

Thanks for (exporting) all the fish

When a reader recently pointed out that fresh fish counters, the type you might see in a Carrefour or Waitrose, are an extreme rarity in Denmark, we wondered why. After all, Denmark has a huge fishing industry and the entire country is within a couple of hours’ drive from the coast.

So why don’t supermarkets in Denmark bother with fresh fish counters? 

We asked around and found out from the Danish Chamber of Commerce that “our best bet is that the business case does not work. That if the supermarkets had it on the shelves, they would not make a profit on them.”

Royal Fish, one of the leading buyers and sellers of Danish fish, put the near non-existence of fresh fish counters in supermarkets down to Danish penny scrimping. 

“The main reason is that Danish people will not pay for fresh food,” chief executive Donald Kristensen said. 

“In Denmark we don’t have a tradition of spending a lot of money on food. If you compare to other countries in Europe, it’s one of the countries where people spend the least,” he added.

It’s not due to a shortage of fish, he stressed. Despite the decline of fish stocks in waters around Denmark and the crisis in the Danish fishing industry, there remains a lot to be caught in Danish waters. 

“We have plenty of fish but we export all of it to the rest of Europe,” he said. “We only work with fresh fish and 99 percent of it is exported to Germany, France, Spain, Italy, in fact all of Europe.”

So there you have it. If you want fresh fish in Denmark, your best bet is probably to visit one of the mobile vans that sell fish from supermarket car parks on a set day each week, or a specialist market like Torvehallerne in Copenhagen.

Failing that, you might have to catch the fish yourself.