Swedish Royals

King Carl XVI Gustaf's 'annus horribilis'

King Carl XVI Gustaf's 'annus horribilis' started last November with the publication of The Reluctant Monarch, a exposé of his playboy past detailing the sex parties hosted for him and his friends by Mille Markovic, a Serbian gangster.

King Carl Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden Photo: AFP
 

By Richard Orange

7:30AM BST 29 Oct 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/8856793/King-Carl-XVI-Gustafs-annus-horribilis.html

 

The book also brought into the open a steamy affair with Camilla Henemark, a Swedish-Nigerian pop singer, who the King was involved with for a year in the late 1990s, with the full knowledge of Queen Silvia, who was powerless to stop it.
 

"The King sometimes looked like a love-crazed schoolboy, and on one occasion they talked about running away together to an isolated exotic island," Thomas Sjöberg wrote in his book.
 
Then, on November 24, a documentary aired on Swedish television that claimed that Walter Sommerlath, the German father of Queen Silvia had grown rich on returning to Germany in 1939 by producing armaments in a factory stolen from the Jews, and that he had joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s when the family still lived in Brazil.
 
These claims conflicted with the account given by Queen Silvia in another documentary, aired at the start of the year. She had claimed that he had not been "politically active", that the factory he owned had produced mainly trains and hair dryers, and that he had joined the Nazi party to save his career.
 
The scandal over Sommerlath's Nazi past was exacerbated when Queen Silvia sent a letter to Jan Scherman, the chief executive of TV4, which aired the programme, complaining about the way her family was maligned.
At the same time, Mr Markovic and Ms Henemark were giving graphic interviews to Swedish newspapers, radio and television about the King's double life, with Mr Markovic threatening further revelations, hinting that he had pictures and even film of the King at some of his parties.

In May, Nuri Kino, an investigative journalist, published a transcript of a conversation between Anders Lettström, the Stockholm musical impresario who is a close friend of the King, and Daniel Webb, a close accomplice of Milan Sevo, a Swedish mafia don.

"I think that you should establish contact and try to find out what the agenda is, what he wants, and what he actually has," Mr Lettström said on the tape, which Mr Webb then handed to Kino. The King has denied that Mr Lettström was acting on his orders.

There was a moment of good news in August, when Crown Princess Victoria, who is popular in Sweden, announced that she was pregnant. At the same time, an independent report commissioned by Queen Silvia to investigate her father's past appeared to exonerate him.

Rather than being gifted the Berlin factory of Jewish businessman Efim Wechsler as a result of his Nazi loyalty, the report concluded, Sommerlath had exchanged it for his own coffee plantation in Brazil, so helping Mr Wechsler and his family escape to safety in South America.