What Is the Trustor Scandal, and Where is its Mastermind Now?

A member of the Guinness family, Lord Moyne (also known as Jonathan Guinness), bought a whopping 52% voting stake in Swedish investment firm Trustor in June 1997—but the money with which he purchased the majority share was not his own. 

Swedish financier Joachim Posener, sometimes called Sweden’s most wanted man, had allegedly masterminded a plan to use Trustor’s own money to buy the company through Moyne and take away millions from the scheme, committing one of the biggest financial crimes in Swedish history.

While serving a six-year sentence at a maximum-security prison facility for defrauding three Danish companies, Posener is said to have come up with a scheme to raid four other companies: Amer, Celtica, Active and Trustor. 

He worked with his cousin, Thomas Jisander, his cousin’s best friend, Peter Mattsson, and the pair’s business partner, Moyne, to set the plan in motion. Moyne agreed to buy the majority voting shares in Trustor from then-owner Per-Olov Norberg, who was looking to sell. 

The agreement was that Moyne would be given a grace period to make his payment, and Norberg would be allowed to buy stocks in Trustor’s most valuable company, Kanthal, a now-century-old electric heating technology company, at book value.

But in less than a month, another company made an offer to buy Kanthal, which was sold for about 894 million Swedish krona (SEK), or about $115 million. The deal with Norberg was reworked, and days later, Moyne and his business colleague, Lindsay Smallbone, were made chairman and CEO, respectively, at an extra shareholders’ meeting.

Next, Moyne, Smallbone, Jisander and Mattsson headed to Barclays Bank in London, where they had employees open a new account and transfer SEK 620 million (about $80 million) from Trustor’s accounts to the new one. Shortly thereafter, the money followed a difficult-to-trace path out into various other accounts.

Finally, Norberg received SEK 241 million ($31 million) from the purchasers. Money that belonged to Trustor.

Meanwhile, Swedish journalist Gunnar Lindstedt was looking into Moyne in the summer of 1997. The reporter knew Moyne did not have the money to take over Trustor himself; before this purchase, his business mostly involved lending his name to other businesses. 

So, Lindstedt sought an interview with Moyne. The interview request process seemed to drag on, but he was able to secure the meeting. When Lindstedt started asking questions about Moyne’s assets, though, he was shut down. 

Lindstedt continued to pursue the story and published his first article on the matter in the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in October 1997. He won the Stora Journalistpriset, an annual prize for journalism, in 1998 for his work.

Around the time of Lindstedt’s article, police raided the Trustor offices. Mattsson and Jisander left for Stockholm to hold a press conference and were promptly arrested.

The pair was convicted in 2001 but won on appeal the following year. In 2009, Jisander was convicted of embezzlement, taking about SEK 20 million ($2.6 million) from Trustor to accounts in Liechtenstein. He was sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison, and the sentence was upheld on appeal. 

Moyne was cleared of wrongdoing.

Posener disappeared from Sweden in 1997. His case was tried without him, as authorities including Interpol were unable to locate him. (He is said to have moved between the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Barbados, Brazil and other countries.)

Before the Trustor affair, while still in jail, Posener changed his last name to “Rolfsson.” He changed it again to “Falk” when getting married, and he has also gone by “Joe.” 

While on the lam, he is rumored to have gotten plastic surgery and mostly uses cash in transactions. Posener has also lost touch with his family and has been at large for almost three decades.

In 2004, a Swedish court ordered Posener to pay Trustor over SEK 100 million ($13 million). The statute of limitations in his case expired in 2007, and he does not face any criminal charges in relation to the Trustor affair, though he can still be prosecuted for any amount he owes in taxes.

The Expressen newspaper reported that police interrogated Posener on November 24, 2009, at the Swedish Embassy in Belgium. He was questioned about an alleged crime in relation to an SEK 3.5 million ($450,000) interview he had given Swedish TV3 five years earlier.

In February 2026, Posener was arrested while working on a documentary about his life and charged with filming a prison on his phone without permission. 

He recounts the scandal in the upcoming documentary Inside the Trustor Scandal, which premieres on August 5.