The government’s former security advisor Henrik Landerholm is charged with negligence with classified information. On Tuesday, a summons was filed with the Attungda District Court.
The charge relates to an incident at Gällöfsta Conference and Manor outside Kungsängen in March 2023. The Swedish Defence University was organizing a conference there together with the cyber defense company Cparta.
One of the participants at the conference was Henrik Landerholm, who had recently taken on the role of the government’s security advisor. When he checked out of his hotel room on Tuesday, March 14, he left behind a red folder with secret documents in an unlocked security cabinet in his hotel room.
Found by maid
The folder was found by a maid in her mid-20s from the conference company’s contracted cleaning firm. In an interview with the Security Police, hotel and conference manager Philip Asénström said that the cleaning staff were from Belarus.
“They were from Belarus. Belarusian,” he said in the interview.
When Samnytt called Asénström, he retracted the information about Belarusian cleaning staff.
“I am accurately quoted, but the information is incorrect,” he said, but otherwise declined to answer questions.
Instead, it is claimed that the maid who found the folder is from Georgia. The female maid has since returned to her home country after being denied an extension of her work permit.
Later that afternoon, Landerholm sent a staff member to the conference facility to retrieve the red folder.
Receives 15,000 from Islamist
On July 17, 2023, barely four months after the conference at Gällöfsta Conference and Manor, the Georgian maid received 15,000 SEK deposited into her Nordea bank account.
The money came from a Russian citizen known to the Security Police, who is linked to a violent Islamist environment. According to a statement to the Swedish Migration Agency, the Russian man, whom the Security Police has wanted to deport from Sweden since the summer of 2019 for security reasons, has a brother in Sweden who was acquitted by the court a few years ago on charges of public incitement, recruitment, and training related to terrorist offenses and other particularly serious crimes. The charges related to terrorist activities in Syria.
During the investigation, Security Police investigators have tried to reach the Georgian woman, without success. It is unclear why the woman received such a large sum of money from the Russian Islamist.
“If this were to have a connection to the documents, it would be serious,” Henrik Landerholm admits in police interrogation.
Denies the allegations
In police interrogation, Henrik Landerholm denies the allegations. He claims that the documents he left behind in the hotel room in March 2023 were not particularly secret.
“It’s just what I consider sensitive, but not necessarily secret,” he says about the papers he left in the unlocked security cabinet.
“Much of my interaction with, for example, the Prime Minister is not secret and cannot be classified as such, but it is sensitive,” he explains.
He also reveals that on another occasion that same spring, he left behind an ‘unsecret’ notebook. He blames the negligence on a heavy workload.
Henrik Landerholm was previously the Director-General of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. In the 1990s, he was a Member of Parliament for the Moderate Party. Landerholm resigned from his position as the government’s security advisor at the end of January this year.