The Swedish pension fund embroiled in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank this spring has been reported to the police by the country’s financial watchdog over a $4.6 billion investment in Heimstaden Bostad AB.
Stockholm-based Alecta said it had submitted the findings of two separate legal opinions to the country’s Financial Supervisory Authority. The internal investigations, which began in September, centered on whether the pension fund had correctly followed the rules in building up a 38% stake in one of Europe’s biggest residential real estate firms.
“The FSA has reported one or several individuals to the police,” Alecta Chairman Jan-Olof Jacke said in emailed comments late on Wednesday. “We have not seen the report and are now awaiting the process.”
Pressure has been mounting on Alecta ever since its investment in one of the largest landlords in Europe began souring amid a widespread funding crunch in Sweden’s property sector, where borrowers such as Heimstaden are struggling to refinance billions of dollars of debt amassed in the cheap-money era.
In September, Alecta’s board hired the law firm Hammarskiold to assess its stake in Heimstaden, the fund’s single largest holding. It was the same month that the FSA opened a probe into the real estate investment.
The law firm “made the assessment that there were deviations from internal rules and that there were indications of violations of the law,” Jacke said. “The board took this extremely seriously and therefore decided to get a second opinion from another law firm.”
The second legal opinion made a different assessment, prompting the fund to hand over both investigations to the FSA for review, according to Jacke.
Read More: Ties to Troubled Landlord Threaten Sweden’s Biggest Pension Fund
The suspected crimes are currently being reviewed by a department within Sweden’s public prosecutor’s office called the National Anti-Corruption Unit, newspaper Dagens Industri reported earlier on Wednesday, citing several sources it didn’t identify.
“I can confirm that on my table is a report from the FSA concerning Alecta that I received Oct. 27,” Johan Lindmark, a public prosecutor at the National Anti-Corruption Unit, told Bloomberg by phone. The prosecutor however declined to comment on the content of the report.
Fueling the fallout from Alecta’s bet on Heimstaden has been what the fund described as an unbalanced shareholder agreement with an investment firm owned by Norwegian billionaire Ivar Tollefsen. The pension fund’s newly installed chief executive has said that the investment should never have been made on such terms.
The Stockholm-based fund is still being investigated by the FSA over three failed bets in the US that led to $2 billion of losses this spring and the ousting of its then CEO and equities chief. The fund’s chair Ingrid Bonde quit last month.
“If a corruption crime has been committed, this could have a clearly negative impact on Alecta’s possibilities to support Heimstaden Bostad,” Danske Bank credit analyst Marcus Gustavsson said in a note to clients.
(Updates with additional context.)
