It started in 2021 when PM Nilsson went out on his boat in the Karlskrona archipelago to fish for eel.
Instead, he got caught in a raid by the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management, who questioned him about the fyke nets he had put in the water.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Nilsson admitted that he found the situation so “embarrassing and startling” that he denied that the nets belonged to him.
A year and a half later, he wrote, a police officer called him just before Christmas. “I was surprised, did not think clearly and maintained my denial."
The eel is an endangered species, and since 2007 eel fishing has been banned in Sweden for everyone but a small number of licensed fishermen.
Nonetheless, smoked eel is popular especially in southern Sweden where the tradition dates back hundreds of years.
"I have fished for eel since I was a child and belong to the southern Swedish eel fishing culture. Putting out nets was previously a natural part of the summer but is now forbidden for private individuals," wrote Nilsson on Facebook.
After the holidays were over, he called police to confess, and accepted paying a 38,000 kronor fine for breaking Sweden’s fisheries law.
Nilsson has been Kristersson’s closest aide since Sweden’s election. Before that he was the political editor of Sweden’s main business newspaper, Dagens Industri, so he's a familiar face in Swedish political and media circles.
Sweden’s political opposition on Thursday called for his resignation.
“It is not appropriate to have a state secretary [the title used by senior political aides in Sweden] who, as recently as December, actively misled the police,” the Social Democrats’ justice spokesperson Ardalan Shekarabi told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.
“The government claims to prioritise law and order. Against that backdrop, it is extremely surprising that the Prime Minister’s state secretary has misled the police in an interrogation situation,” said Shekarabi.
Nilsson wrote in a text message to DN, as well as in his Facebook post, that he should have come clean from the start and that he was happy to accept his fine.
Comments