Tvind Founder Mogens Amdi Petersen
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Tvind’s Founder
A mysterious guru-figure and founding member of Tvind, Amdi Petersen, is alleged to be in charge of the money raised by Tvind, the “shared” money. According to estimates from Danish police documents Tvind is now worth at least 100 million pounds.
Yet, in a sinister twist, Amdi Petersen has been in hiding for 22 years.
“There’s no doubt at all about who’s at the top of Tvind”, says Britta Rasmussen. She’s another “escapee” of the Teachers’ Group, the inner sanctum of Tvind.
She tries to explain why Petersen was such a compelling leader. “It was the eyes,” she says, “he would fix you with his stare. He was a very brilliant speaker. He was like a god to us. We stopped reading newspapers. He was our only source of what was going on in the world.”
A host of Danish journalists have been on Petersen’s trail since his disappearance. In Autumn 2001 journalists linked him to a luxury penthouse in Miami – just one example of the luxurious lifestyle he is believed to have enjoyed. But Petersen remained elusive.
News of Petersen’s allies made his story even more tantalising to the Danish media. For many years he’s been friend and ally to Robert Mugabe, who has helped him establish numerous money-making enterprises in Zimbabwe. Tvind has supported many “interesting” regimes over the years – from Pol Pot to Gaddafi.
A long investigation by Danish police into alleged tax evasion and fraud in one of Tvind’s charitable organisations culminated in an international arrest warrant being issued for Petersen.
- Source: Denmark’s Tvind, BBC, Mar. 21, 2002. Audio version broadcasting by BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 21st March 2002
Petersen disappeared from Denmark in 1979 and long was elusive. He was arrested in America in Feb. 2002:
The arrest of Mogens Amdi Petersen in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM on Sunday comes almost exactly two months to the date after Holstebro Police secretly had international arrest warrant issued on him.
“We asked to have him arrested because we suspected that he would (not show up in court) if charges were to be brought against him. We have had an international arrest order out on him since December 18th,” Kaasgaard said.
[...]The idea that Mogens Amdi Petersen would try and avoid a court case in Denmark is nothing new to Holstebro police.
“We have been suspecting this all along. But we had to do wait until now when we feel that we have a good chance of putting him away. Our suspicion has definitely grown lately. The documents we found in the computers (seized from Tvind last year) shows that Amdi indeed is pulling all the strings in Tvind.” Jens Kaasgaard did not wish to speak about the specific findings in the documents.
[...]Mogens Amdi Petersen’s arrest comes after police has been investigating a number of Tvind people including Mogens Amdi Petersen and Tvind CEO, Poul Jørgensen.
The two are, along with five other Tvind members charged with gross abuse of trust and tax abuse amounting to 75 million DKK.
Last April the investigation reached a climax when police raided eight central Tvind locations nation-wide. During the subsequent search police confiscated a number of computers, including one belonging to Mogens Amdi Petersen. Several hundreds of thousands of documents have been found on the computers, including some that according to police prove the alleged misuse of the funds taken from Tvind’s humanitarian trust.
Mogens Amdi Petersen and his five co-defendants are under suspicion for having deceived the taxation authorities by using the trust money unlawfully. The contributions to the trust were tax-exempt because they were to be spent on not-for-profit schemes, but the police suspects Amdi Petersen and his people instead used the tax-free millions on Brazilian plantations and a TV project in Oceania.
- Source: Amdi Petersen arrested in the US, Jyllands-Posten, Denmark, Feb. 18, 2002
Amdi Petersen was extradited to Denmark on Sep. 19, 2002.
Petersen is said to have pleaded guilty to a number of charges, but on Sep. 1, 2006, a court convicted Sten Bryner, the financial controller of several Tvind-related companies, of both embezzlement and tax fraud. Mogens Amdi Peterson and six others were acquited.
Prosecutors immediately said it was likely that they would appeal. They now are said to have additional evidence against Petersen and the other men who were acquitted. At the time of this writing two have been served writs but the other five, Petersen included, are believed to have left Denmark.
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• This page, Tvind Founder Mogens Amdi Petersen, was first posted: Dec. 8, 2006• The entry was last updated: Feb. 3, 2010
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