SPIN DOCTORS (2)

Back in a time that now seems a very long while ago (i.e. the autumn of 2011), a commission was set up to investigate, amongst other things, who had leaked details of Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt's tax affairs to the press when she was merely leader of the opposition.

After three years of work, which has involved investigating 45 witnesses, the answer emerged this week; nobody knows. The report, at more than 1,800 pages, is a door-stopper, but its conclusions are feeble. The top civil servant in the tax department, who has been suspended on full pay for the past three years, got more involved in the case than he should have done; a couple of civil servants said things they shouldn't have said; and the Parliamentary Ombudsman was misinformed.

All that leaves two groups of people happy and two unhappy. The first happy group is the main opposition political party Venstre, whose leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen is set to regain Prime Ministerial office at the next general election. His loyal lieutenant Troels Lund Poulsen, who was Tax Minister at the time and a likely forthcoming Minister in any new government, has been cleared of all impropriety, as has his then spin doctor (though if Mr. Lund Poulsen was so squeaky clean, then why did he feel the need to take unpaid leave of absence from Parliament when the commission was set up?). The second happy group is the legal profession. 33 of the 45 witnesses were deemed to have the right to legal representation, paid for by the state. Between them, all of these lawyers have notched up healthy fees.

The first unhappy group is Ms. Thorning-Schmidt and her husband, who still don't know who was out to get them. The second is the general public (i.e. taxpayers), who will wonder what is the point of paying a whopping kr.25 million to get a fat report that doesn't lead anywhere, and a lot of bills from well-off lawyers.

Walter Blotscher