Published 15 December 2022 at 14.03
Economy. Länsförsäkringar Bank has recently locked several functions on Nya Dagbladet's bank accounts and now announces that it is considering terminating the entire account, says Nya Dagbladet's news director Isac Boman in his own newspaper.
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Bank purges
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Despite the election campaign being over, Swedish banks continue to close accounts for the country's alternative media.
Boman, who has researched precisely the concentration of power in the banks at Åbo Akademi, states that the newspaper was aware that this type of measures against alternative media are common in the Swedish banking sphere.
The newspaper's editor-in-chief Markus Andersson says that the banks' closure of independent journalists and political opinion leaders threaten fundamental democratic rules of the game in Sweden.
– If there are no conditions to conduct free journalism in Sweden due to the banks' arbitrary procedure, everything else is of secondary importance to our business, he says.< /p>
Fria Tider conducts newspaper business without its own bank accounts today, since Swedbank terminated both the company's business account and owner Widar Nord's personal accounts in 2020. The bank was forced after Widar Nord sued them to reopen the personal account, but refuses to provide any business accounts.
< p>– That's right. In that trial, it was clear that Swedbank neither accused me nor Fria Tider of having done anything suspicious with the account. They had no questions about any transactions or any comments about the use of the account, but wanted to suspend us anyway.
As for the private account, that measure cost the bank nearly one million kroner in legal costs, as Swedbank lost the case in the district court. But it is not obvious that the banks are prevented from shutting off alternative media from such things as internet banking and bank giros, says Widar Nord.
– They have an obligation, according to Swedish rules, to provide the account itself. But there are no clear rules that the banks must give companies access to the national payment systems, such as Bankgirot, on equal terms. There are EU legal rules in the competition law that seem to entail such an obligation, but they are vague and there is a significant risk that you as a company lose a process based on these rules.
It was not only Fria Tider, which had its accounts closed before the 2022 election campaign. Samnytt profiler Mira Aksoy and right-wing publisher Daniel Friberg also had their accounts terminated by Swedbank, and the company Swebbtv was denied bank accounts in another major bank for what the editorial management there described as obviously political reasons.
After the banks' purges, which are still in effect, the Member of Parliament Björn Söder (SD) asked the then Minister of Financial Markets Per Bolund a written question about whether he intended to do something about political discrimination from the banks in Sweden, Soumen utiset reported. Bolund did not intend to do that, he announced in a reply.
It now remains to be seen whether the new government, which is backed by SD, intends to strengthen companies' right to bank accounts.