Scams In The Sauna Industry

The sauna is the pharmacy of the Finnish people. You simply cannot separate the Finnish people from their saunas. Take a look around Finland, and you'll see that's true. Even apartment buildings and businesses have saunas.

Tenants are assigned one or two time slots in the sauna each week - a time that is seldom forfeited. In addition, many corporations have Plastic sauna suit by which executives might invite visiting business associates to unwind after long meetings. Although Americans are accustomed to sweating it out in a sauna and then showering, Finns will repeatedly alternate between sweating and cooling off - sometimes relaxing for an entire evening by going in and out of the sauna.

Usually, the sauna is adjoined to a shower, although it may instead be near a swimming pool or a plunging pool - small, deep pool that features frigid water temperatures. Another option, which is in keeping with Finnish customs, is to cool off between sweating by rolling in snow. The ultimate sauna experience, however, is at lakeside, where sauna participants indulge their sweating bodies with a jump in cool lake water. Many Finnish people build their summer houses alongside the countries many lakes for this reason.

A Nord-South tale of twins and coincidences befogs Michael Evans. Some twins take sibling rivalry to another level. Take Rickard Gardell, boss of private equity mob Pacific Equity Partners, and his Sweden-based twin, Christer. Rickard's now rather busy trying to buy Flight Centre, Veda Advantage, Borders bookstores as well as being part of the Wesfarmers consortium trying to buy Coles. But he's also defending a lawsuit by which PEP has been accused of making undeclared payments to employees of an advertising agency.

And now Christer, who also happens to run a private equity firm of his own, is making headlines in a legal wrangle. One of Christer's employees at Cevian Capital has been arrested in one of Sweden's biggest insider trading scandals. The Swedish version of ASIC - whose acronym is nothing like ABBA - arrested the unnamed man after he bought shares in vacuum cleaner mob Electrolux, having allegedly scored some insider info. Sweden's corporate clog said the alleged crimes took place over a period of a couple of years. The Cevian employee has been jailed since the scandal broke in mid April and is being held to stop him from destroying evidence or warning others involved in the scam, police said.

Christer, one of Sweden's richest men (the competition's tough - think Bjorn Borg, Benny and Bjorn, Mr IKEA Ingvar Kamprad) - with stakes in crash test dummy car outfit Volvo and telco Telia Sonera, isn't impressed.

The similarities between the Gardell twins are eerie. Rickard also does a good line in vacuum cleaners through PEP's stake in Godfrey's. Golden oldies are best. With an average age of more than 60, the Commonwealth Bank's board has more creaky bones than most. But that hasn't stopped it taking particular interest in a recent deal for the CommBank-owned Colonial First State to buy a pop music back catalogue of 25,000 song titles. In fact, this deal went the whole way to the top.