Just finished the book Konsulterna: Kampen om karolinska, and decided to write a review!
Konsulterna: Kampen om Karolinska by Lisa Röstlund
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is an amazing example of investigative journalism.
This is the story of how the hospital “Nya Karolinska” became the 13th most expensive building in the world, and still function very poorly after being built. The costs are to a high degree related to using a very expensive public procurement model called OPS. The building and moving process has been subject to many cases of at least border line corruption. The most illustrating example involves a previous management consultant that got hired at an official position at Nya Karolinska. He then proceeded to employed, without public procurement, his consultant friends for 600-700K USD/year for unspecified work. In total the consultant company BCG was paid around 25M USD for their work, most of it unspecified.
Uncovering such a story seems to me like a very difficult task. The authors have done a very good job of presenting the story like peeling an onion: uncovering a bit, and making sure to revisit the previous details to make sure you remember how the new information is connected to previous information.
I have now abandoned the illusion that widespread corruption does not exist in Sweden.