Here is the paperwork on those loans. Each entry pairs one of the game's cards with something that actually happened: fines, verdicts, settlements or perfectly legal industry practice, sources included. The card index is not complete, and it never will be. Reality ships more expansions than we do.
Paid comment armies
In 2013, Samsung was fined roughly 340,000 dollars by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission for hiring students and bloggers to bash rival HTC in online forums. The agency running the campaign sent Samsung weekly reports with comment tallies and achievement rates. Trolling run as a consulting project, complete with KPIs and status meetings.
Sources: VentureBeat · Slate
The industry behind it got stung in 2013, when New York's attorney general set up a fictional yogurt shop in Brooklyn and asked SEO firms for help with its reputation: 19 companies ended up paying over 350,000 dollars over fake-review schemes, with reviews written in Bangladesh, Eastern Europe and the Philippines for between one and ten dollars apiece. The troll costs less than the yogurt.
Sources: New York Attorney General · NPR
Closer to home: in 2021 the Danish Chamber of Commerce reported a company to the police for fake Trustpilot reviews, and Trustpilot itself received a multi-million kroner fine for insufficient review controls.
Sources: Dansk Erhverv · DR
Protesters for hire
Crowds on Demand is an American company that has openly rented out protesters, fans and "concerned citizens" since 2012, at times for hundreds of dollars per participant. In 2018 the company was sued by a Czech investor who claimed a rival had hired protesters to march outside his private home.
Sources: Wikipedia · InfluenceWatch
The company got its biggest stage in New Orleans: the utility Entergy was fined five million dollars by the city council in 2018, after paid actors had appeared as concerned citizens at two public hearings and spoken warmly in favour of the company's new gas power plant. The actors were hired through the company's PR firm, which had ordered them from, yes, Crowds on Demand.
Sources: Utility Dive · The Lens
The agency pitches the story
In 2011 Facebook hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to quietly pitch critical stories about Google's privacy practices to journalists and bloggers. The firm refused to say who its client was. One blogger published the whole email exchange, and Facebook had to admit it was behind the campaign. The playbook is classic: the agency talks to the press, the competitor gets the story, and the client's name appears nowhere.
Source: The Guardian
Denmark has delivered the genre in its purest form: when the newcomer BIOS won the ambulance tender in the Region of Southern Denmark from Falck in 2014, Falck drew up a strategy against its new competitor. Negative stories were covertly fed to the press and to employees, social media was put to work, and paramedics considering a move to BIOS were deliberately discouraged. The Danish Competition Council found that Falck had abused its dominant position to push BIOS out of the country; BIOS went bankrupt along the way. Falck accepted a fine of 30 million kroner and had paid 152 million in damages. This is exactly this card. We just painted it.
Sources: Danish Competition Authority · DR
The TV tip
Consumer watchdog shows live on tips and have exposed everything from tax fraud to systematic scams. The shows do important work, and tips can come from anyone: whistleblowers, former employees, customers of course and, in the nature of things, competitors. Viewers rarely learn who sent them. In the game there is no doubt. It is you. The card names are fictional, but the inspiration is two beloved Danish institutions: DR's Kontant and TV 2's Operation X.
Sources: DR on Kontant · TV 2 Operation X
The PR firm's own news site
In 2018 Facebook hired the PR firm Definers, which planted negative stories about Google, Apple and others through its own news site, NTK Network, and tried to tie Facebook's critics to George Soros. Facebook fired the firm when the New York Times exposed the arrangement.
Sources: Forbes · TechCrunch
It can also bring down the agency itself: Britain's Bell Pottinger ran a covert campaign for the Gupta family in South Africa using fake accounts and the hashtag #WhiteMonopolyCapital. The industry's own association expelled the firm in 2017, and it collapsed shortly after.
The bought watchdog
Walmart, Oracle and the country's largest mall operator backed the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, according to the Wall Street Journal: a seemingly independent grassroots organization whose actual purpose was to criticize Amazon. The tobacco industry used the same move in the 80s and 90s with artificial "smokers' rights" groups fighting smoking bans.
Sources: GeekWire on the WSJ report · The Drum
Fake accounts at scale
The Wiki-PR scandal of 2013: more than 250 user accounts were banned from Wikipedia for paid editing of company articles. Wikimedia subsequently tightened its rules so that paid editing must be openly disclosed.
Source: Wikipedia on the Wiki-PR scandal
And the Devumi case: the company sold millions of fake followers and likes from bot accounts, often built on real people's stolen identities. The New York Times exposed it in 2018, the company shut down the same year, and settlements with the New York attorney general and the FTC followed.
Sources: New York Attorney General · On the FTC settlement
Shell companies and tax havens
The Panama Papers leak of 2016: 11.5 million documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed shell companies belonging to politicians, corporations and celebrities in more than 200 countries. The Paradise Papers followed a year later.
Source: ICIJ
The Nordic contribution: through Danske Bank's small Estonian branch flowed roughly 200 billion euros between 2007 and 2015, mostly from customers outside Estonia. In 2022 the bank pleaded guilty in the US and paid more than two billion dollars.
Sources: SEC · Greenberg Traurig on the settlement
Dividend tax
The Danish dividend tax case: until 2015, the Danish treasury was defrauded of roughly 12.7 billion kroner through illegitimate dividend tax refunds. The case led to trials in several countries and ranks among the biggest fraud cases in Danish history.
Source: Wikipedia on the CumEx files
In 2024 the main figure, Sanjay Shah, was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Danish court, the harshest sentence for financial crime in Danish history. He has appealed.
Source: DR
Data breaches
The 2017 Equifax breach hit 147 million people and ended in a settlement of at least 575 million dollars with US authorities.
Source: FTC
Uber went another way: when hackers took data on 57 million users in 2016, the company paid them 100,000 dollars to stay quiet and booked the amount as a bug bounty. The chief security officer was convicted in 2022 for covering up the breach.
Sources: US Department of Justice · Bloomberg
Greenwashing
In the game, a polished green image can make a shitstorm bounce off, regardless of what goes on behind the facade. In reality, regulators have caught on: Danish and EU authorities have tightened documentation requirements for climate claims in marketing, precisely because the move worked so well.
Source: The Danish Consumer Ombudsman
And the price of getting caught is bearable: in 2019 Ryanair advertised itself as Europe's "lowest emissions airline", based among other things on an efficiency ranking from 2011. The UK advertising authority banned the campaign as misleading; the airline had meanwhile become the first carrier to enter the top ten emitters in the EU's carbon trading system, where the rest of the list was coal plants. The sanction was that the ads could not run again in that form. That was the entire sanction.
Sources: BBC · The ASA ruling
The seven-year phone war
Apple and Samsung spent 2011 to 2018 suing each other across the globe while trading billions in components with each other at the same time. The case ended in 2018 with 539 million dollars to Apple, after which the parties settled. It became famous as the billion-dollar fight over, among other things, a rectangle with rounded corners.
Sources: Bloomberg · Insurance Journal
You can also fight without courtrooms: in the 2000s, Intel paid HP, Acer and Lenovo to cancel or delay computers running processors from its rival AMD, and to restrict where they could be sold. The European Commission calls these naked restrictions and imposed a fine of 376 million euros in 2023, which the EU's General Court later reduced to around 237 million. The product was ready. The manufacturer wasn't.
Sources: Euronews · Courthouse News on the reduction
The dumpster
In 2000 Oracle admitted to hiring private investigators who tried to buy the trash of organizations arguing Microsoft's case during the antitrust trial. The detective agency offered the cleaning staff 1,200 dollars for the garbage. Larry Ellison later called it a civic duty.
Sources: Time · The Register
HP went a step further in 2006: the board chair had private investigators obtain phone records of journalists and board members by impersonating them. The chair had to step down, one investigator pleaded guilty, and HP settled with the journalists it had surveilled.
Sources: Wikipedia on the HP scandal · Washington Post
And the card indexes are still being kept: in 2019 Le Monde revealed that Monsanto's PR firm had maintained lists of around 200 French politicians, journalists and scientists, with contact details, opinions and a score for their stance on the company's products, ready for use ahead of the EU's glyphosate vote. Similar lists existed in six other countries. Bayer, which had bought Monsanto, apologized while initially noting that nothing suggested the lists were illegal. Two years later, France's privacy regulator fined Monsanto 400,000 euros over the handling of them, in part because the people listed were never told. The card index was legal. Keeping the people in it in the dark wasn't.
Sources: BBC · Corporate Europe Observatory · The CNIL decision
Threaten a lawsuit
When Financial Times journalists dug into the payments company Wirecard, the journalists were reported to the police by Germany's financial regulator for market manipulation, and short selling of the stock was banned. Eighteen months later 1.9 billion euros were missing from the books, the management was on the run, and the charges against the journalists were dropped: their reporting was accurate.
Sources: Wikipedia on the Wirecard scandal · ESMA on the short ban
And while the journalists were being investigated, Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke up for Wirecard on a state visit to China, after a meeting with a former minister whose firm advised the company. The parliamentary inquiry later called her naive; she defended herself by saying that despite all the press reports, there was no reason to assume serious irregularities. The press reports were worth an investigation. It was just the journalists who got one.
Sources: Euronews · Business Standard (AP)
The short report
In 2020 the short seller Hindenburg Research published a report on the electric truck company Nikola, pointing out among other things that the company's promotional video showed a truck simply rolling downhill. The founder was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years; in March 2025 he was pardoned by President Trump. The report was also a business: Hindenburg had shorted the stock and profited from the fall.
Sources: CNBC on the verdict · CNBC on the sentence
The lookalikes
Lookalike products are a billion-dollar industry, and the courts go both ways. The cider: Thatchers won its January 2025 appeal against Aldi's lookalike, with the court finding the similarity was meant to tell shoppers "like Thatchers, only cheaper". The cookies: Oreo maker Mondelez sued Aldi in May 2025 over copied packaging, and that case is still running. The chair: Stokke has won copyright cases over the Tripp Trapp chair in several countries, but lost the trademark on the shape itself at the EU Court of Justice.
Sources: IPKat on the Thatchers ruling · CNN · INTA on Tripp Trapp
And the Danish ceramics war: the Maritime and Commercial Court ordered TV nutritionist Christian Bitz and wholesaler F&H to pay 6.4 million kroner to ceramicist Kasper Würtz, because 15 products in Bitz's stoneware series were imitations of Würtz's handmade ceramics. The case ended years later in a confidential settlement.
Sources: DR · Jyllands-Posten
The deal not to steal each other's people
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe made secret agreements not to recruit each other's employees. It held down wages for tens of thousands of engineers, and in 2015 a judge approved a 415 million dollar settlement for roughly 64,000 workers. In the game, the headhunt is an attack. In reality it was so valuable that the ban on it was a cartel.
Sources: TechCrunch · NBC News
The method can be upgraded from employees to entire competitors: the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck paid four generic drug makers in 2002 to keep their cheap version of the antidepressant citalopram off the market. The European Commission imposed a fine of 93.8 million euros in 2013, and the EU Court of Justice upheld it definitively in 2021.
Sources: Bloomberg Law · Herbert Smith Freehills on the ruling
Fan the strike
Tesla refused to sign a collective agreement in Sweden, and in October 2023 IF Metall's mechanics went on strike. Then it spread: dockworkers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland blocked Tesla cars, electricians dropped Tesla jobs, and the postal service withheld license plates for new Teslas. The conflict became one of Sweden's longest ever and ended in August 2026, after 1,021 days, when Tesla had bought out the last strikers. In the game, you are the one fanning your neighbour's strike.
Sources: The Register · Electrek
The non-compete
For years the sandwich chain Jimmy John's had hourly sandwich makers sign agreements barring them, for two years, from working for competitors within about two miles of any Jimmy John's store. The attorneys general of New York and Illinois challenged the clauses in 2016, and the chain settled, agreed to stop using them and paid 100,000 dollars in Illinois.
The consultants' report
McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma on how to "turbocharge" OxyContin sales in the middle of the opioid crisis. Internally the plan was called Evolve to Excellence. The consulting firm has since paid 573 million dollars in settlements with US states and a further 650 million to the federal authorities.
Sources: NPR · US Department of Justice
The commissioned study
In the 1960s the sugar industry paid Harvard researchers for review articles that cleared sugar and pointed to fat as the culprit behind heart disease. The payment was never disclosed, and the articles shaped dietary advice for decades. The documents only surfaced in 2016. In the game, studies are attack cards. That is not a coincidence.
The sugar industry hid the payment. Today you don't have to hide anything: in Denmark, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the commercial foundation that controls the country's largest company, handed out around nine billion kroner in 2023 for research, education and innovation among other things. The state's independent research fund handed out 1.7 billion for researcher-initiated work. Everything is in the open, much of it is excellent, and 2,252 researchers have still jointly warned that external funding can tie up universities' own budgets, steer research priorities and squeeze free basic research.
Sources: Videnskab.dk · Forskerforum · Altinget
Hire the minister's son
JPMorgan ran an internal program in Asia called Sons and Daughters: children of Chinese officials and executives got jobs and internships, prioritized by the business their parents could refer to the bank. The bank paid 264 million dollars in 2016 to close the case.
The Nordic parallel: Sweden's Telia paid more than 330 million dollars to a shell company owned by the Uzbek president's daughter to enter the country's telecom market. The 2017 global settlement cost 965 million dollars.
Norway contributed a domestic variant: while Erna Solberg was prime minister, her husband carried out 3,643 stock trades, which without her knowledge made her disqualified in a string of matters she handled anyway. The economic crime unit found no indications of insider trading and never opened an investigation. No case, no verdict.
And a Danish case from this year: when the British defence group Babcock set out to bid on Denmark's multi-billion purchase of new frigates, it hired the foreign minister's son, Bergur Løkke Rasmussen, to handle contact with Danish politicians and ministries. All of it was legal and happened in plain sight, and a purchase of this size goes through the government's coordination committee. His father sits on it. Spokespeople from several parties called the arrangement nepotism; he himself rejected any conflict of interest and ended his role with the company in August 2026. The frigate purchase remains undecided.
Sources: DR · TV 2 · Information (editorial) · DR on the exit
The revolving door
When former European Commission president José Manuel Barroso became chairman of Goldman Sachs International in 2016, advising on Brexit, it triggered a case at the EU ombudsman, a petition with 80,000 signatures and longer cooling-off periods for departing commissioners. The door swings both ways: companies lend experts to the system, and the system's people move out to the companies they used to watch.
Sources: LSE · Corporate Europe Observatory
The Uber Files leak also showed that former EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes contacted senior Dutch officials on Uber's behalf while she was still within her cooling-off period and had been explicitly refused permission to work for the company. The EU's anti-fraud office OLAF investigated and found no basis to establish a breach of the rules: the contacts fell within her approved role as a Dutch startup envoy.
Sources: European Parliament · DutchNews
And the classic: a few weeks before Gerhard Schröder stepped down as German chancellor in 2005, the deal for the Nord Stream gas pipeline was signed with Schröder and Putin looking on. Shortly after he left office, it was announced that he would chair the company behind the pipeline, controlled by Russia's Gazprom. The door barely had time to swing.
Sources: BBC · Alliance for Securing Democracy
The lobbying firm in Brussels
Lobbying is legal, and that is the whole point. In the game, the Connection cards are the legal lane; they are in reality too. The tech industry now spends a record 151 million euros a year influencing EU legislation, more than any other sector, with roughly 890 full-time lobbyists on the job in Brussels. Much of it is registered, and most of it is perfectly legal.
Sources: Corporate Europe Observatory · EUobserver
And it works. When the car industry was caught cheating on emissions tests in 2015, it responded with lobbying: the following year it convinced the Commission and the member states that the legal NOx limits could not be met on the road, and the limits were relaxed so that new diesel cars could legally emit more than double the limit until the end of 2020. The European Parliament's own inquiry pointed to lobby pressure as part of the explanation. Later measurements showed that 87 percent of new diesel cars could meet the original limit just fine. The cheating never became legal. It just became unnecessary.
Sources: European Parliament inquiry · Transport & Environment
Norway delivered the textbook case: when the government proposed a 40 percent resource tax on salmon farming in 2022, the fish farming billionaires answered with what the tabloid VG called the lobbying campaign of all time. The tax ended at 25 percent, and the salmon industry's party donations grew from a few hundred thousand to 18 million kroner ahead of the next election. Set against the difference between 40 and 25 percent of an entire industry's profits, it is probably close to the best-yielding campaign in Norwegian history.
Sources: VG · Ræder Bing on the vote
Write the bill yourself
An investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity found more than 10,000 bills in US state legislatures copied almost word for word from templates written by interest groups and corporations. More than 2,100 of them became law.
Source: Center for Public Integrity
The EU edition was caught with the copier running: during the negotiations on the data protection regulation, the LobbyPlag project showed that MEPs had submitted amendments copied word for word from lobby papers written by, among others, Amazon and eBay; a single Amazon document contained 41 pages of ready-made amendments. The law in question was the GDPR. The one that protects your data.
Sources: Privacy International · Corporate Europe Observatory
Paid questions in the chamber
Cash for questions, 1994: Two British MPs took money, up to 2,000 pounds per question and reportedly delivered in brown envelopes, to ask questions in the House of Commons on behalf of the owner of Harrods. The scandal ended their careers and cost their party one of its safest seats.
Sources: Yahoo News UK · Tobacco Tactics (University of Bath)
The methods have been updated since 1994. During the pandemic, two German CSU politicians brokered face mask deals for the state and took millions in commission. Germany's highest court ruled in 2022 that this was not criminal bribery, since the parliamentarians had merely used the authority of their mandate and their contacts, and the seized millions were paid back. Not to the state. To the politicians.
Sources: Legal Tribune Online · t-online
And the brown envelopes still exist, they have just grown into suitcases: in 2022 Belgian police found more than one and a half million euros in cash around the European Parliament, including a suitcase carried by a vice-president's father. The affair was named Qatargate. More than three years on it is still waiting for its trial: the investigating judge had to step aside over a possible conflict of interest, the investigation remains open, and the accused deny all charges. The suitcases were the fastest-moving part of the entire case.
Sources: Wikipedia on Qatargate · Euronews
The campaign chest
Across Europe, political influence rarely arrives in a brown envelope. Companies, trade unions and industry groups finance parties, sponsor political events, join business networks and employ professional lobbyists to ensure that their interests are heard. The rules differ from country to country, but the transaction is familiar: provide money, expertise or access, and receive a place in the political conversation.
This is not necessarily corruption. It is how organised interests participate in politics. Those with the largest campaign chests simply participate more efficiently.
According to international corruption rankings, Denmark has almost no corruption. What we have instead is networking. The rules say parties must disclose the name of any donor giving more than roughly 20,000 kroner. In 2019 it emerged that a politician from the party Venstre had received 100,000 kroner from the same owner, paid through five different companies at 20,000 apiece. The name stayed below the disclosure threshold under the interpretation of the rules used at the time; legal scholars debated whether it was circumvention, but no case followed. That was precisely the point.
In the 2022 election, the Moderates party received large donations whose senders were never published, and four parties afterwards demanded the rules be changed. Meanwhile the fund behind some of the world's largest offshore wind farms supported candidates from six different parties with 21,500 kroner each, just under the disclosure threshold. When the opposition later wanted to know whether offshore wind investors had received special treatment, party leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen was called before a parliamentary committee; the fund denies giving special support to anyone.
The arrangement is not confined to Venstre and the Moderates. Socialdemokratiet operated Erhvervsforum Vækst, where organisations paid 20,000 kroner a year for meetings with leading politicians. In 2021, it emerged that the Danish Dental Association had referred to its paid membership while seeking a meeting with the incoming health minister. Transparency International Denmark called it paid preferential access and corruption. That was the organisation's assessment, not a court ruling.
Sources: Transparency International Denmark · Altinget
Elsewhere, the arrangement is advertised openly. Liberal Alliance's business club offers companies meetings with its parliamentary group, monthly political briefings and an opportunity to influence policy development while supporting the party's campaigning. The annual fee is 19,500 kroner plus VAT. The Conservatives offer businesses "special access" to the party and meetings with senior politicians for 5,000 kroner a year, with the proceeds funding local political work.
Sources: Liberal Alliance · The Conservative People's Party
None of these business clubs is secret, and their existence is not evidence of a crime. That is what makes the system so Danish: political access, campaign support and networking can occupy the same room without anybody agreeing on what to call it.
The Danish Agriculture & Food Council openly hands out millions in party support, on the grounds that nearly every other major organisation does it too. The argument is correct. In the 2026 election, which came to revolve around drinking water and pigs, Venstre could not convince voters that the party does not primarily represent agriculture's interests, according to the daily Information. The Council of Europe's anti-corruption body GRECO has called Danish party funding rules globally unsatisfactory for more than a decade. We call them grey zones. It sounds nicer.
Sources: Altinget · Information · DR on GRECO
The useful regulation
When the US Congress gave the FDA power over tobacco in 2009, market leader Philip Morris supported the law and helped write it. Competitors dubbed it the Marlboro Monopoly Act: the marketing restrictions froze market shares, and the market leader had the most to freeze.
Denmark has its own edition: when the CO2 tax was agreed in 2022, the standard rate landed at 750 kroner per tonne. A small group of the country's largest emitters, those with so-called mineralogical processes, get away with 125. The largest of them is the cement plant Aalborg Portland, Denmark's single biggest CO2 emitter, with a discount of up to half a billion. The argument is jobs and the risk of production moving abroad, and it is a real argument. It is also the argument that always wins.
Sources: DR · Altinget · Information
And the flip side of regulation is the bill: in the 1950s and 60s, the chemical plant Cheminova deposited toxic waste in the dunes at Høfde 42 on Denmark's west coast, with the authorities' permission. The depot is today one of Denmark's so-called generational pollutions; the cleanup is agreed at 728 million kroner. Cheminova's long-time owner, Auriga, a subsidiary of Aarhus University's research foundation, voluntarily contributed a one-off 125 million. Taxpayers pay the rest. The dumping was legal. Most of the bill is public.
Sources: Lex on Høfde 42 · Central Denmark Region · Dagens Byggeri
The think tank
Over twenty years ExxonMobil channeled more than 36 million dollars to think tanks and groups sowing doubt about climate science, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 36 million for twenty years of doubt is cheap, by the way. The alternative was changing the business model.
Sources: Union of Concerned Scientists · DeSmog
Industry's own climate coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, spent the 1990s telling lawmakers and journalists that the role of greenhouse gases was "not well understood". In the coalition's internal 1995 report, its own scientists wrote that the scientific basis was well established and could not be denied. That passage was edited out before publication. They knew. They had written it down themselves.
Sources: Climate Investigations Center · DeSmog on the GCC
The friendship at city hall
The Danish Farum case: Mayor Peter Brixtofte had the municipality pay nine million kroner over price for a sports hall renovation, in return for the contractor sponsoring the town's handball club with ten million. He got two years in prison for gross abuse of office, upheld by the Danish Supreme Court in 2008.
Sources: DR · Lex on the Farum case
The genre lives on, just with better lawyers: in the town of Fredericia, the mayor bought one of the municipality's building plots with an oral bid, although the rules required written ones. He resigned, the national oversight board stepped in, and one expert called it one of the biggest scandals in Danish local politics ever. Prosecutors dropped the criminal case, noting among other things that the municipality had followed its own practice for oral bids. The municipality's own practice. For selling the municipality's own plots. To the municipality's own mayor.
And in the Copenhagen district of Frederiksberg, the conservative mayor bought a 460 square metre grand apartment unusually cheaply and sold it just under four years later at a profit of 11 million kroner, while politically campaigning against housing speculation. No case, no verdict. At the next election his party lost the mayoralty it had held for more than a hundred years.
Source: Altinget
It will cost jobs
When Amazon put its second headquarters up for bid in 2017, 238 cities bid with tax breaks and grants. New Jersey alone offered seven billion dollars. The promise of 50,000 jobs made cities pay to be chosen.
Sources: Brookings · BuzzFeed News
The promises do not always hold: in 2017 Foxconn promised Wisconsin 13,000 jobs and 10 billion dollars of investment in exchange for billions in subsidies. In 2021 the deal was renegotiated down to 1,454 jobs and a subsidy cap of 80 million dollars.
Sweden has its own edition: the battery maker Northvolt promised green industry and thousands of jobs in Skellefteå and received state guarantees, EU support and nearly six billion Swedish kronor from the AP pension funds. Its 2025 bankruptcy became Sweden's largest in modern times: around 5,000 employees, debts of up to 80 billion, and the pension money is gone. The promise of jobs is the surest key to the public coffers. It works even when the factory doesn't.
In Denmark, the company does not even have to put itself out to tender: in Kalundborg, the biotech area around Novo Nordisk got its own train station as early as 2018, christened Biotekbyen Kalundborg Øst, financed jointly by the state railway agency, the municipality and the company, with a footbridge leading directly onto the company's grounds. Novo pledged four million kroner; the state and the municipality covered the rest. Then came plant expansions of first 17 and later 42 billion, and the municipal plan keeps designating new business zones to match, while the planning department has been staffed up to keep pace. The town is thriving, and everyone is happy.
Sources: Banedanmark · Danish Parliament transport committee · Kalundborg municipal plan 2025 · Kristeligt Dagblad
State aid with a tax card
Ireland's tax rulings gave Apple an effective corporate tax rate as low as 0.005 percent. In 2024 the EU Court of Justice finally ruled the arrangements were illegal state aid, and Apple had to pay back 13 billion euros. The subsidies per step of Political Influence are the game's version of the same handshake.
And LuxLeaks: documents leaked in 2014 showed that Luxembourg had granted tailored, confidential tax deals to several hundred multinational companies.
Source: ICIJ on LuxLeaks
The Danish version requires neither a leak nor an island: Danish shipping companies pay tonnage tax, a levy based on the size of their ships instead of tax on their profits, roughly 150 million kroner a year for the entire industry, no matter how record-breaking the year. When the world's governments negotiated a global minimum tax, Maersk worked to keep shipping out of it, and the Danish government called that "nothing unusual". Apple had to go to Ireland. The shipping companies got it delivered at home.
Sources: TV 2 · DR · DR on the government's response
The Netherlands tried to hand out the gift in the open: in 2017 Mark Rutte's government wanted to abolish the dividend tax, around two billion euros a year that no voter had asked to give up. Released memos showed that Shell and Unilever had lobbied for the abolition during the government formation talks. The plan was dropped when it could not even keep Unilever's headquarters in the country, and Rutte has since called it one of his biggest mistakes. Not the proposal. That it never went through.
Sources: Dutch Parliament · TaxLive
Cartels in the tenders
The Danish road marking case: the country's two largest road marking companies bid together as a "consortium" on the Road Directorate's tenders, with districts divided in advance and joint prices. The Supreme Court found the consortium illegal in 2019, and in 2024 the High Court found the violation criminal but waived the penalty: the companies had acted in excusable ignorance of the law. Guilty, no punishment.
Sources: Danish Competition Authority · On the criminal case
And the Atea case, the largest bribery case in Danish history: public officials received trips, dinners and equipment from a special account while their region bought IT for more than half a billion kroner from the supplier. Eight people were convicted at trial in 2018; the appeals ended mixed, and one former executive was fully acquitted in 2022 after a Supreme Court remand.
Sources: Danish Courts · TV 2
And cartels exist far beyond public tenders: currency traders from five major banks spent years coordinating trades and exchanging sensitive information in private chatrooms, and in 2019 the European Commission fined them a combined 1.07 billion euros. The chatrooms were called, among other things, Three Way Banana Split, Essex Express and Semi Grumpy Old Men. Satire is redundant here. The names were their own.
Sources: European Commission · CNBC
Greenwashing at scale
Volkswagen installed cheating software in eleven million diesel cars so they passed the test in the lab and polluted up to 40 times the limit on the road. The bill passed 30 billion dollars, and the company pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the US.
Sources: US Department of Justice · EPA
Fund giant DWS marketed itself as an ESG leader until police raided its Frankfurt headquarters. The fines ended at 25 million euros in Germany and 19 million dollars at the SEC, and the CEO stepped down. The case started with an internal whistleblower.
Sources: ESG Today · ESG Today on the SEC fine
All cases are described from publicly available sources such as fines, verdicts, settlements and press coverage. Where a case was dropped, settled or is still running, we say so, and an accusation is not a conviction. None of the companies, shows, parties or people mentioned have any connection to Ruthless Returns. The game is satire: the methods are real, the companies in the game are not.