When an injustice is so massive, yet so concealed, it can drive anyone to madness. Most people can’t bear to face corruption head-on when the stakes are so high. But a Swedish financial insider named Victor X is sacrificing everything to uncover the truth.
Is this man the key to exposing the largest money laundering and financial fraud scheme in world history? Before becoming Victor X, he was Victor Carlstrom, a top money broker in Sweden. Although he rose up the ranks quickly, he was thrown down even further and faster.
Carlstrom was effectively criminalized after raising concerns over suspicious financial activity in 2015. The numerous investigations for tax violations turned up nothing, but they were just the beginning. Death threats and even apparent assassination plots hit very close to home, even if home was a hotel room in a foreign country.
After fleeing Sweden for the Netherlands, then relocating to the United Arab Emirates and finally the United States of America, his family could no longer take the constant runaway lifestyle hopping from hotel room to hotel room. He is now estranged from his ex-wife and their two kids.
That’s why he dropped his last name in August 2020, a symbolic act signifying the great personal losses he endures to this day as a whistleblower against the elites he used to do business with.
X may be on the rebound, however. He certainly is far from done fighting.
His $4.2 billion RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) lawsuit against some of the biggest players in global finance is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, just one layer below the U.S. Supreme Court. It was first filed in December 2019 in the Southern District of New York.
To garner support and awareness for his situation and the state of Swedish finance, X plans to live-stream himself on a 14-day hunger strike under heavily armed security outside the White House sometime this Spring.
It’s interesting that X would choose the White House to be in the background. Burisma, the Ukrainian oil company that paid the totally inexperienced Hunter Biden an exorbitant salary to gain access and benefits from then-Vice President Joe Biden, has done dealings with SwedBank, one of the major institutions that are now a defendant in the RICO case.
There’s little reason to doubt X will follow through with extreme measures like a hunger strike, given the life he’s led going back over five years.
His arrival to the U.S. in April 2019 followed three months of hiding out in the United Arab Emirates after first fleeing from Sweden to the Netherlands in January 2019. He’s lived out of hotel rooms for over two years now, but even when he was still in his home country, going back to 2015, he’d been living a life under duress.
In 2014, Carlstrom was the highest volume broker for Folksam, the largest financial firm in Sweden, when he was instructed to decrease his company’s investment into the firm. The year prior Folksam gained a new Director-General in Jens Henriksson, a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund.
In 2015, Carlstrom began voicing concerns internally about what he found suspicious at Folksam. From there, Carlstrom claims some $12 million in commissions were stolen from him, as were many of his clients, with Folksam breaking the contract it had with his company.
Soon after that, Carlstrom was under government-led investigations into tax crimes. The man heading the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (SFSA) in charge of the probe had close connections to Folksam and Henriksson as well. No crimes were unearthed, despite months of inspection.
Carlstrom’s attorneys found evidence of quite the contrary, that Folksam, SwedBank, and governmental bodies like the Swedish Tax Agency as well as the SFSA were corrupt. Government investigators didn’t see enough to go on within 30 minutes of review and cut the meeting short, according to Carlstrom.
However, Carlstrom still suspects fraud and money laundering involving individuals and companies in Eastern Europe, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, Scotland, Turkey, and Middle Eastern countries as well as Swedish authorities.
What happens if Carlstrom is not only right but proven so in court?
“I definitely believe the department of financial services in New York will remove the U.S. dollar clearing for the banks Swedbank and SEB as the only appropriate penalty for the largest money-laundering crime in history,” he said in an email.
“This will most likely start the next global financial crisis and stock market crash,” X said, comparing the hypothetical to the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.
X is not all doom and gloom though.
“In the future, I want to set up a charity organization to help other whistleblowers,” he wrote.
Here is a man with nothing to lose, and all he has to gain is everything that makes life worth living: his family, a real home, even his own name and the dignity that used to come with it.
Tens of millions of Americans, and at least as many people abroad as well, are all fighting for much the same thing as X. If justice comes, it may not come only from the bottom-up, but also from the inside-out.
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