Scandinavia

SCANDINAVIA IS A region of northern Europe consisting of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, with Iceland also included occasionally for reasons of cultural proximity. In recent decades, these countries generally have established a reputation for a high-class welfare state, funded by comparatively high levels of taxation and with neutralist international tendencies that have not hampered efforts to contribute to international peace and reconciliation efforts but does translate into a certain skepticism about international political organizations such as the European Union. Welfare state provision has meant a comparatively low level of underground economic activities and low misuse of migrant workers.

The Scandinavian countries consistently rate amongst the nations with the lowest levels of corruption and other forms of white-collar crime. They have frequently taken a leadership role in the promotion of social responsibility in business ethics and have looked to shape international organizations such as the European Union according to their principles. The ideas that they favor include the use of regulation to require firms to take their[Page 722] social responsibilities seriously and the use of shareholder and stakeholder interests representatives at board level for similar reasons.

However, research has indicated that there is, nevertheless, a quite high level of fraud throughout the region in some sectors. To try to identify the extent of fraud and to introduce joint policies to help to reduce that level, industries such as the insurance industry have established cross-border initiatives. On some occasions, corporate wrongdoing has been attached to Scandinavian firms as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

For example, the Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraAB merged in 1999 with the British firm Zeneca Pharmaceuticals to form AstraZeneca, which was subsequently prosecuted and fined for conspiring with medical practitioners in the United States to defraud the Medicare system by making false claims for drugs it marketed. In other cases, a more familiar predilection for greed and a febrile internet-backed atmosphere, that provided the opportunity to indulge it, produced a familiar result.

The innovative use of technology has also been a feature of fraud in the region, with one notable case involving the planting of fake automatic teller machines (ATMs) in central Copenhagen, Denmark, used to extract money from unwary individuals.

Scandinavian firms have also been among those accused of wrongdoing in connection with mining practices in resource-rich, but economically underdeveloped areas, although such allegations are also made against mining companies in most world regions.