Word: glistrup
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...there any way to stop the endless increases in both taxes and bureaucracy? One political newcomer whose more or less serious answer is attracting increasing attention is Mogens Glistrup, 46, a Copenhagen attorney and head of the fledgling Progress Party. His solution: stop paying taxes altogether. Anything less drastic, he says, is "almost immoral...
...Glistrup is a creator of companies which do not actually produce anything, are capitalized for a mere $1,600 and are ready-wrapped with the necessary legal documents. He has created 2,591 such companies since 1970. Some of them are sold to Danes who want tax shelters; the others he keeps for himself. By making his companies borrow money from each other, and pay tax-deductible interest to each other, he manages never to show a profit and thus never to pay taxes...
...past year, baffled Danish authorities have been searching through Glistrup's books for some secret that would explain his legerdemain, but Glistrup insists that there is no secret. "My yearly accounts are always negative," he boasts. "I explain this to the tax people. They agree. As a lawyer, I should welcome this absurd theater, so absurd that it beats Ionesco completely, but what I want to do is show how unreasonable these tax laws...
...Glistrup disapproves not only of the way Danish taxes are collected but even more of the way they are spent. Denmark's $8.2 billion budget could be cut by at least one-fifth, he says, and 80% of the civil servants transferred to productive jobs "without harming the socially weak." He proposes closing all Danish embassies abroad, for example, since Denmark really has no independent foreign policy. The Danish army? Disband it, Glistrup advises. "We should replace the general staff and the Ministry of Defense with a Russian-language recording that says 'We surrender...
Despite his irreverent views, Glistrup himself is a very serious worker. He gets up at 2:30 every morning at his home north of Copenhagen, takes a swim in his indoor pool, studies papers for a couple of hours, then catches the 5:18 train to town, where he labors on, undisturbed, until his 76 associates and secretaries arrive. His law firm is, in fact, Denmark's largest...