It is about the Swedes' state pension, about the part that everyone for the past 20 years has to choose how it should be placed, and where the individual pensioner takes the brunt if things go wrong.

In the Stockholm District Court, the main hearing in the second part of the Falcon Funds scandal started today. In the first, the principals were sentenced to several years in prison. That case is currently being decided by the Court of Appeal.

Two skeins

In a completely different case, the one about Allra, where more than 130,000 future pensioners had their money, the accused were acquitted earlier this year, but a preliminary investigation is still ongoing in the second part. The first is on its way to the Court of Appeal.

The two skeins have several things in common:

1: For many of the savers, it started with a telemarketer.

2: The pension money has been invested via the funds in complex securities with a difficult-to-assess value.

3: The people behind it have ultimately seized a large part of the money themselves, and

4: Before that, the money has taken the road across Malta in slightly different ways

Of the points above, probably none was predicted by politicians when the system was introduced. The intention was that as many as possible would make their own, informed choices and influence their pension. Good funds would get many savers, bad ones would compete.

But just the kind of funds that have had rocket development for several years turned into disaster investments when the IT bubble burst roughly at the height of the first premium pension choices.

Many people probably felt that they did not have sufficient control and were not able to make the right choice. By the way, they were in good company. When the first major investigation of the premium pension system was made in 2005, the investigator himself, also a professor at the School of Business, admitted without hesitation that he had made a completely wrong choice, and that he also discovered it only when he went through his own premium pension savings in connection with the investigation.

It probably did not feel easier after the next major crisis - the Financial Crisis - had struck.

The more than 20,000 savers in the Falcon Funds tangle had taken the opportunity to let the telephone salesman choose a completely different fund for them. But the now convicted bought up their PIN codes and moved the money to their fund without the savers' knowledge. Then they bought inflated securities for the savers' money and then seized the money themselves, a quarter of a billion.

Moved to Malta

The next step, which is now to be decided by the district court, became even more lucrative. The money was moved to Malta, in a new fund. Now the pension savers' money was completely out of the control of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. Instead, the Maltese Financial Supervisory Authority had supervisory responsibility. At the same time, the recently resigned Minister of Finance became chairman of Falcon Funds.

More and larger deals with even more complicated and inflated securities were made, via several tax havens. This time, the pension savers blew half a billion, according to the indictment.

The former finance minister tells the prosecutor that he did not know about the scheme and is not suspected of crimes, nor does he appear in any other criminal schemes that have been revealed in Malta since the 2016 Panama Leak, sometimes with ministers involved. But Malta has for several years been heavily criticized by the European Parliament, among others, for its methods of attracting capital, even criminally.

In total, the frauds and suspected frauds lasted for four years before the funds were stopped by the Swedish Pensions Agency.

Now the politicians in the pension group finally agree that it may be best to procure the funds before people have a choice.

However, it will take a couple of years - the work is delayed due to the next major crisis, the Corona crisis.