By Lucy Komisar
Ever hear of the Cum-Ex scandal? Hint, it’s not about sex, it’s about money. There is so much financial corruption it’s hard to keep the stories straight. Eyes glaze over. And the mainstream media working with western governments generally lets the malefactors off the hook. (“Oh, so complicated!”)
Playwrights also rarely shine a piercing theatrical light on the crooks. Anna Skov Jensen’s stunning “The Insider” follows Lucy’s Prebble’s “Enron” in 2010 and James Graham’s “Make It Happen” this year at the Edinburgh Festival. It has to be massive fraud for the mainstream to take notice.
Relevant perhaps that Jensen is Danish and this was produced by a Danish company that produces shows about world themes and that the other shows are British. Where are the American playwrights skewering the corrupt money-men who run the country? Or maybe they can’t get produced.
“The Insider” is significant not only for telling the story about one of the world’s biggest financial scams (more than $63 billion in money cheated national treasuries revealed with arrests in 2014 compared to Bernie Madoff’s nearly $65 billion in fake profits revealed in 2008), but directed by Johan Sarauv doing it smartly through a one-man show with headsets provided to the audience so that in one ear they hear a whistleblower (the superb Christoffer Hvidberg Rønje) who we see speaking on stage inside a glass enclosure, and in the other we hear the other recorded characters. (Marion Reuter (Anne Brorhilker, leading detective), Zoe Mills (Nurse, The Virgin Mary, Speaker), Benjamin Kitter (Hanno Berger, tax attorney and criminal), William Halken (new investor).
On the backdrop are visuals of the sites, included British financial centers such as Canary Wharf. (Vivid set and video design by Signe Krogh.)
The cum-ex scandal was based on dividend taxes owed to one country that were actually never paid but were refunded when the owner of the shares claimed they had been sold and taxes paid to another country.
Could they really do this? Were financial controls so flimsy? Were there so many corrupt banksters and collaborators to carry out the fraud? And why aren’t dozens in prison?
Oct 14, 2014 at 8 am, police in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Madrid, Sydney, capitals of 14 countries raid hundreds of firms and individuals.
The play focuses on a young financier (Christoffer Hvidberg Rønje) who in 2016 is being interrogated in Germany. He was a lawyer with a family and working at a large bank.
Hanno Berger (Benjamin Kitter), his boss and the corrupt mastermind, threatens him not to go to the prosecutor in Cologne, “No one has ever left the Cum-Ex network. We could be invincible.” He accuses him of weakening the case.
But he becomes the German State’s crown witness. The German Treasury lost millions. Europe lost $55 billion.
Rønje shows him as diffident, then arrogant, frightened, terrified, distraught. He moves like a robot at the start. He is screaming at police.
Then we hear the voice of the interrogator. Why did he do this? He was getting $8 million the first year, then $12 millon. Rumor is that it started at Morgan Stanley Bank.
How did he get involved? Turns out the organizer of the scam, Hanno Berger, noticed him. Berger didn’t like socialism, ”where the unfit are allowed to survive.” The younger man says he can’t see how this tax strategy can be legal. Berger says, “The law is complicated.” And he invites him to the opera.
We see a share rising. Then sent to investor in another country. Both investors claim the dividend tax rebate. The same tax is refunded 3, 4, 7 times. The young man explains, “You just need someone to write up the documents, someone like a tax lawyer in dividend season.”
He says, “The idiots pay out the full amount, tens of millions appear in my bank account.” He tells how they recruit others for the scheme. In a London restaurant a private chief is asked can you play the game?
The interrogator says, “We need names big fish little fish, planketon and shrimps.”
There are so many big banks that are complicit. Barclays, Credit Suisse, Paris Bas, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, more.
There were some high-profile convictions, mostly in Germany and Denmark, bankers, traders, lawyers, stockbrokers. Berger got 8 years in prison. Others got 3 to 8 years, all individuals, no punishment of the big banks, since they control the governments.
“The Insider,” a very important play, won a Fringe First award from “The Scotsman” in 2023.
“The Insider.” Teater Katapult, in collaboration with Nordiska ApS, Copenhagen. Written by Anna Skov Jensen, directed by Johan Sarauv. The Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh. Runtime 65min. July 30 to Aug 23, 2025.