Imagine parking your brand-new Ferrari at the beach, walking down to the water for a couple of drinks, and then… never seeing that Ferrari again. Not stolen. Not towed. Just gone. And imagine you’re so absurdly, incomprehensibly rich that you genuinely don’t care. That’s not even the wildest part of this story. That’s just Tuesday for the guys who pulled off one of the most audacious corporate heists in European history. This is the Trustor scandal, and it’s a masterclass in how to steal a fortune while technically staying (mostly) inside the law.
A $183 Million Deal and a Two-Month Bender
In the summer of 1997, a Swedish investment firm called Trustor got bought out. The company was owned by a man with a name so glorious we had to sound it out several times — Per-Olov Norberg — who held a majority stake. He sold to a group of European businessmen from Sweden, Denmark, and the UK. A bunch of guys who, and we mean this with love, all looked like dads who own boats.
The purchase price? Around 830 million Swedish kronor. Adjusted and converted, we’re talking roughly $183 million in today’s dollars. A serious, legitimate corporate acquisition.
And how did two of the buyers — Thomas Jessander and Peter Matsson — celebrate closing this massive deal? They immediately fled to St. Tropez and spent two straight months setting money on fire. A 100-foot yacht with a helicopter landing pad. 408 bottles of champagne. Two matching Ferraris (one red, one blue) — one of which, again, simply vanished. They’d land their helicopter on a restaurant rooftop, ruin everyone’s dinner, and then buy the whole restaurant’s meals as an apology. At one point Matsson ran into a Versace store and bought everything — including, allegedly, the shelves, the light bulbs, and the cash register — just so Jessander couldn’t buy anything.
Total estimated damage: 50 million euros. In two months. Just for fun. Hold that thought.
The Lord, the Ghost, and the Prison Notebook
While these two partied, the real brains were working elsewhere. On paper, the mastermind was Lord Moyne — real name Jonathan Guinness, heir to the Guinness fortune (yes, the beer and the world records). His title and reputation as a “legitimate businessman” opened all the right doors, even though he’d never really done much legitimate business.
But behind Lord Moyne stood the true architect: Joachim Posner, a Danish tax attorney we’ll call the Ghost. Posner had already served time for embezzling money from a client. He lost his career, his home, his wife, his daughter — everything. And while sitting in a Danish prison (where, incredibly, they let him leave on regular weekend furloughs), he plotted his comeback. On those little prison vacations, he’d grab stacks of business magazines, research companies, and fill a notebook with a grand plan to break back into finance the only way he could — by breaking a few laws.
He picked Trustor for two reasons: it was loaded with assets, and it had a two-tier stock system where certain shares carried ten times the voting power. Control the right 17%, and you control the whole company.
The Loophole That Made It (Almost) Legal
Here’s the genius — and infuriating — part. When the group signed the deal, the terms gave them five days to actually pay. But control of the company transferred immediately.
So they signed, took control, and then reached into Trustor’s own bank account. They wired around 730 million kronor from the Swedish bank to a freshly opened account at Barclays in London, paid themselves fat “compensation” packages, paid off a mob loan they’d taken to finance the whole thing, and then paid Per-Olov his $200 million — with his own company’s money. He saw the wire come in, thought “great, I got paid,” and walked away, never realizing he’d just funded his own buyout.
They didn’t spend a single cent of their own. The only genuinely illegal moves? The mob loan, and the fact that — as investigators later established — you can’t buy a company with that company’s own assets before you actually own it. It’s like buying a car with the cash you find in its trunk.
Netflix, Plastic Surgery, and the Age-Progression Fail
The party in the Riviera is what sank them. Regulators saw two guys torching 50 million euros and started asking exactly the right questions. When the walls closed in, Posner ran. He flew to Brazil, got plastic surgery, grabbed a couple million dollars, and spent the next decade bouncing around the globe — Brazil, Nicaragua, the U.S., Europe — never staying anywhere long.
Authorities released an age-progression photo of what they thought he’d look like: a chunkier face, a bad haircut, a mysterious goatee, and what appears to be a lazy eye they gave him for no reason whatsoever. The real Posner looked nothing like it.
And here’s the kicker: nearly 30 years later, the statute of limitations expired. Posner agreed to appear in the 2024 Netflix documentary The Trustor Scandal, showed his face, and told his whole story from a very nice home funded by hidden trusts. He insists the only illegal thing he did was the mob loan.
Jaron and Tim dig into all of it — the vanishing Ferrari, the stripped-bare Versace store, the Danish prison weekend passes, and the maddening question of whether a guy who drained a fortune through a legal loophole is a criminal genius or just a really good reader of fine print. It’s greed, arrogance, and one very glorious loophole, all wrapped up in the most 90s heist you’ve never heard of.
Things I Learned Last Night is an educational comedy podcast where best friends Jaron Myers and Tim Stone talk about random topics and have fun all along the way. If you like learning and laughing a lot while you do, you’ll love TILLN. Watch or listen to this episode right now!
Sources
- Trustor affair – Wikipedia
- Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne – Wikipedia
- What Is the Trustor Scandal? | A&E
- Where Is Joachim Posener Now? All About the Swedish Financier from Inside the Trustor Scandal | Biography