V a t t e n f a l l - Sweden´s other face

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Lars G. Josefsson
President & CEO Vattenfall AB
Horno, November 17, 2001
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Dear Mr Josefsson,
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When I first wrote to in January of this year, shortly before your meeting with the Minister of Economics of the Federal State of Brandenburg, in Potsdam, I warned you that you would hear the truth about the Horno conflict from neither the Brandenburg Government nor the LAUBAG Company. I also informed you in some detail of the history of the Horno dispute and about the background to pending court cases. In particular I drew your attention to the fact that an outline contract on a possible resettlement of Horno was currently being negotiated, but that this contract would contain no agreement to resettle; and I warned you, that LAUBAG would tell you another story.
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I was therefore all the more surprised when I read a copy of a letter you sent to Hans-Josef Fell, Member of the German Bundestag, on May 15th 2001, in you made the following statement: "Horno and LAUBAG have been negotiating a socially-acceptable resettlement and the relevant contracts have already been signed."
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In my letter to you of June 5, 2001, I told you that this statement was simply untrue, that no contracts whatsoever had been signed, and I reminded you of the warnings in my earlier letter. I went on to tell you, that the truth had never played a significant role in LAUBAG's dealings with the Horno people, and that one major reason for this was the fact that LAUBAG's business philosophy is based on two fundamental lies: the lie about ecologically-compatible, subsidy free brown coal strip-mining, and the lie about socially-acceptable compulsory resettlement. I concluded by expressing my dismay, that despite my advice, you had apparently decided to continue LAUBAG's decade-old policy of misinformation.
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A couple of days ago, on November 15, my fears were confirmed in an article in the Berliner Morgenpost, in which LAUBAG-spokesman Peter Fromm was quoted as saying that almost all Horno people had long ago signed contracts for land at the resettlement site. This, Mr. Josefsson, is a barefaced lie. As I have also repeatedly informed you, not one Hornoer has signed a contract for land at the new site in Forst. The only step undertaken by those people who would resettle in Forst if Horno can in the last resort not be saved, is that most of them have secured their right to a particular piece of land in Forst with an preliminary entry in the land register, a step that commits them to nothing!
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