Conference turris::scandia

338.0. "Head of Oslo Stock Exchange drowned" by TLE::SAVAGE () Wed Dec 14 1994 11:09

            OSLO, Norway (AP) -- The body of the president of the Oslo
    Stock Exchange was found floating off Norway's southeast coast Tuesday,
    hours after he was fired on suspicion of financial impropriety.
            Erik Jarve's body was spotted in the Skagerrak Sea near Bamble,
    60 miles southwest of Oslo, where he owned a summer cabin, said
    Geir Sonstebo, assistant police chief in nearby Porsgrunn.
            ``We assume the cause of death was drowning, but that won't be
    confirmed until the autopsy is completed,'' Sonstebo said.
            He would not release any other details.
            Jarve, 50, had been president of the stock exchange since 1977,
    and was known for his campaign against corruption in financial
    circles.
            He was dismissed Monday after the stock exchange's board of
    directors made accused him of using his position for improper
    personal gain.
            ``It's tragic. He has been an institution at the exchange and
    it is impossible to believe that he is no longer here,'' said acting
    exchange director Kjell Fronsdal. ``His life was the exchange.''
            In a vaguely worded statement Tuesday, the exchange board said
    Jarve had been accused of impropriety in connection with about
    $40,000 he earned from the purchase of a new trading system. It
    said he was believed to have earned $7,352 more through irregular
    channels in 1994.
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             OSLO, Dec 13 (Reuter) - The director of the Oslo stock
    exchange was found drowned early on Tuesday in an apparent
    suicide the day after he was fired from his job because of
    alleged financial irregularities.
             Erik Jarve, 50, who was the public face of the bourse for
    two decades until his sudden dismissal, drowned in a fjord near
    his summer house in Telemark province, a police statement said.
             ``There is no suspicion of any criminal act,'' Telemark police
    spokesman Geir Soesteboe told Reuters, indicating the police
    suspected suicide. ``Nobody else was involved.''
             The bourse board, which sacked Jarve on Monday for allegedly
    mixing his ``private economy and the economy of the bourse'',
    elaborated on the case on Tuesday after his tragic death.
             ``On the one hand I feel guilt, but on the other hand there
    was no other way we could have handled the matter,'' Elisabeth
    Wille, chairwoman of the board, told a news conference.
             She said the board learned last week that Jarve had charged
    about 300,000 crowns ($48,000) worth of private bills to the
    bourse earlier this year. He also benefitted indirectly from
    negotiations on a new trading system for the bourse, she added.
             ``It was not the sum that was decisive,'' Wille, looking pale
    and strained, said. ``It was the (lack of) trust that the bourse
    could not live with.''
             Wille said Jarve had reacted calmly and that he had agreed
    dismissal was fair and that a suspension pending a full
    investigation into the case would do no good.
             ``There was nothing in his behaviour that indicated something
    could happen,'' she said. ``To learn this morning that things went
    wrong anyway was all the more difficult.''
             His body was found at 1.25 a.m. (0025 GMT) by police who had
    been alerted to the isolated house by Jarve's family, which
    feared something might have happened to him.
             Wille said Jarve's alleged wrongdoing had not affected trade
    on the bourse and hoped the tragedy would not hurt its
    reputation as a centre for trading in securities.
             ``But it's clear that this will leave a mark and we will
    always have to live with it,'' she said.
             Traders, stunned first by Jarve's dismissal and then by his
    death, held an emotional ceremony of remembrance for the bearded
    and friendly man who administered the electronic modernisation
    of the Oslo stock exchange to international standards.
             The Norwegian flag flew at half-mast on the roof of the
    neo-classic bourse building in central Oslo as grim-faced
    dealers came and went. The all-share index closed 0.36
    percentage points lower and trade was subdued.
             ``I am sure Jarve would have wanted us to continue trading as
    usual,'' interim bourse director Kjell Froensdal, his voice
    choking, told Norwegian radio. ``The bourse was his life.''
             ``It is indescribable, a tragedy,'' he said. ``He was an
    institution. You cannot grasp it that he is no longer around.
    Traders were shocked and appalled. A man was here yesterday, is
    gone today, a man with whom everyone had a special and personal
    relation. We feel empty,'' he added.
             It was the latest of a series of scandals to shake Norway's
    closely-knit financial community and it involved the man bent on
    cracking down on insider-trading and other irregularities.
             ``Restoring confidence will probably be the most important
    task for the Bourse in the days ahead,'' Jarve wrote in a
    newspaper article in April 1993.
             Jarve, who is survived by a wife and two children, was
    appointed to head the exchange in 1977 at 33 years of age -- the
    youngest ever to hold that job.   

            OSLO, Norway (AP) -- The apparent suicide of Oslo Stock
    Exchange president Erik Jarve stunned Norwegians, but the allegations 
    of financial impropriety against him probably did not.
            Jarve, 50, lived for his work and was seen as the ``Face of the
    Exchange.'' When he was fired Monday for allegedly using his
    position to benefit family members, his reputation as an
    anti-corruption campaigner was shattered.
            Hours after he was fired, he was found drowned near his cabin
    in south Norway. The business community was staggered by the loss of
    the popular head of the exchange, known by his shaggy grey beard
    and dark suits during his 17 years in the job.
            Despite the shock and grief, the small Oslo Stock Exchange
    actually gained slightly on Wednesday.
            ``It is a very big tragedy for his family,'' said Kjell Tangen
    of the Kreditkassen Bank's trading department.``But the market has
    not been affected'' because investors keep the personal and
    business sides of their dealings separate.
            Even average Norwegians are growing inurred to the rise in
   economic crimes. A special police unit set up just five years ago
    has reported a sixfold increase in white-collar crime between the
    mid- and late-1980s.
            ``It has really exploded,'' said Lars Oftedal Brock, chief of
    the 65-member elite economic crime unit. ``Norway still has a very
    low crime rate.''
            On Wednesday, another lingering financial scandal flared when
    the head of Norway's Central Bank was named among 150 people sought
    for questioning in the case of four business leaders charged with
    taking illegal tax deductions.
            ``When you get one scandal after another, people seem to go
    `Oh, well' and go on with their business,'' said Tangen, of
    Kreditkassen. ``The good side is that is doesn't affect the
    market.''
            Norway, a country of 4.3 million people, is now Western
    Europe's largest oil exporter and all that wealth caused the economy 
    to overheat in the mid-1980s.
            Somewhere along the way, some people believe Norwegians may
    have lost sight of their law-abiding tradition.
            ``A lot of people began to associate success with lots of
    money, and weren't particular about how they got it,'' said Brock of 
    the police.
            He said companies and police were getting tougher. But that
    alone doesn't explain a 13-fold rise in bankruptcy-related crimes
    since 1987, compared with a five-fold rise in actual bankruptcies.
            The allegations against Jarve, the stock exchange president,
    were relatively minor: pressuring a supplier into hiring his son
    and paying some of his son's expenses with the bourse's money.
            But even in a country facing an explosion of financial scandals
    that was too much.
            ``It was a breach of trust,'' said board chairwoman Elisabeth
    Wille.