Illegal disposal
It is the biggest environmental scandal in recent Swedish history: the once highly praised waste disposal company NMT Think Pink is said to have illegally disposed of tens of thousands of tons of waste. Charges have already been filed against eleven suspects. Among them is the company's founder and self-proclaimed “garbage queen” Fariba Vancor.
12/29/2023 7:58 pm
Online since today, 7:58 pm
Since 2015, NMT Think Pink is alleged to have illegally disposed of and buried rubbish and construction waste at a total of 21 sites in 15 municipalities in central Sweden. The scandal was exposed in 2020. The investigation file now contains 45,000 pages. The process is expected to last several weeks and more than 150 people are expected to be questioned as witnesses, Swedish media reported.
According to the newspaper “Göteborgs-Posten”, the amount of illegally dumped waste amounts to 200 thousand tons. During their investigations, investigating authorities found harmful amounts of arsenic, lead, zinc, copper, petroleum products and dioxins in many locations. In 2019, a fire broke out in a warehouse where NMT Think Pink stored industrial waste in the municipality of Gullspang. The fire department only managed to control the fire after two weeks.
Eleven defendants
In total, charges were filed against eleven people. Five of them will have to answer for serious environmental crimes. They are accused of disposing of waste in a way that could cause pollution of the environment “that is or has been harmful to human health, animals or plants”. The punishment range is six months to six years.
The five accused include the director of the company Vancor, who called herself Bella Nilsson, and her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson. Vancor's lawyer, Jan Tibbling, denied the allegations to Swedish media. His client denies any wrongdoing. He criticized the slow pace of the investigation.
Sex club manager and start-up founder
Nilsson was born in Tehran in 1969 and came to Sweden as a teenager in the mid-1980s. She worked as a stripper and ran a sex club. She became known to the Swedish public in 1998 when she published a book about her life story under the name Isabella Johansson.
Start-up NMT Think Pink became one of Sweden's fastest-growing companies in the 2010s. In 2019, the company recorded sales worth almost twelve million euros. On her blog, Vancor described herself as the “queen of trash.”