– If there is one thing the crisis shows, it is that the patience with the billionaires must end, says Rødt leader Bjørnar Moxnes to Børsen.
On Saturday, he gave his first major election campaign speech.
There he devoted a lot of time to raging against billionaires such as Petter Stordalen and the government’s support schemes during the pandemic.
To Børsen, Moxnes further says that we must “stop being fooled by people like Petter Stordalen, even though he has a good mood and is good at TV”.
Think billionaires get too much
– Plays on popularity
– When Norway shut down, Petter Stordalen sent text messages to Norway’s Minister of Finance. When he heard about the support scheme that was on the way, he replied that this was “fantastic news”. When the scheme was ready, the message from Stordalen was: “Quite simply roll of the dice 6”, Moxnes said in the speech.
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In six months, the Stordalen group received six times more in compensation from the state than what the group paid in tax in five years, the Red leader claims.
– When the crisis strikes, the hotel barons receive hundreds of millions from the community. While in good times they give zero and nothing in local wage settlements to the hotel employees, he continued.
PENALTY BILLIONARS: Red leader Bjørnar Moxnes does not spare the powder when he goes out against the richest in the country. Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB
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– Stordalen is a capitalist in sheep’s clothing. He adorns himself that he cares about the community and the climate, but flies business jets and uses all loopholes to avoid paying taxes, Moxnes tells Børsen.
He further believes that Stordalen is not alone in this.
– This is how it is with many billionaires in Norway, they wear Marius sweaters and think they can get away with tax tricks and greed, as long as they are a little popular. That bluff lasted a long time, but the corona crisis has revealed the billionaires: They are people who only think of themselves, never of the rest of us.
– The only ones who still have not revealed the bluff are probably the government, which continues to give them everything they point to. Erna Solberg’s hopelessly naive crisis policy simply deserves a roll of the dice, Moxnes continues.
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– Makes up only 13 percent
It was in mid-April last year that the Storting adopted the compensation scheme for business and industry.
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The scheme must, according to the government help cover “unavoidable, fixed costs” for companies that may point to a revenue drop of more than 30 percent as a result of the pandemic.
The scheme has been continued with some minor changes, and is currently valid until the end of June.
The stock exchange has presented Petter Stordalen with the criticism from Moxnes. Torgeir Silseth, CEO of Nordic Choice Hotels, answers the following:
Will choke the corona support to Stordalen
– We are a little surprised that a Storting politician has not agreed that the compensation scheme is paid to companies and corporations, not to individuals. The support that Nordic Choice Hotels has received amounts to approximately 13 percent of the unavoidable fixed operating costs at our Norwegian hotels, and the majority of our losses have been covered by bank loans and savings and added funds from the owner, Silseth writes in an e-mail to Børsen .
– The fact that the hotel companies are at the top and have received fairly similar schemes throughout the Nordic region, is due to the fact that tourism has almost been banned from doing business through all the restrictions. But it is also because we employ many people. Nordic Choice alone has over 90 individual hotels throughout Norway with a total of over 8,000 employees. We are already shortened through the current support scheme due to our size. To think that we should not get transfers is the same as saying that our jobs are less valuable than others, he continues.
Bets billions on new mall giant
Silseth further says that their motivation now is to get as many people as possible back into work and continue to create new jobs for the future.
– Moxnes should also focus on facilitating that, Silseth writes.
Criticized the crisis packages
Moxnes is not alone in believing that the compensation schemes have been skewed.
Ole-Andreas Elvik Næss, postdoctoral fellow in social and business research at NHH, has looked at who has actually received support from the compensation scheme for companies.
Stordalen Hotel lost in court
According to his calculations, 0.1 percent of the companies received 31 percent of the support in August. 1 percent of the companies received almost half of the support.
Several economics professors have pointed out that a few large companies have received significant transfers. Torfinn Harding, professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Stavanger, referred to this as “wrong priorities” by the government to Børsen.
In May, the Office of the Auditor General presented its investigation of the government’s crisis packages. There they also concluded that some companies received a disproportionate share of crisis support from the government, while many small players may have fallen outside the schemes.
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