KERTEMINDE: That the employees in the administration of Kerteminde Municipality were exposed to a difficult conflict of loyalty - and how it happened - is a recurring element in a 191-page long investigation by the Attorney General Poul Schmit.
The municipality launched the investigation this year after criticism of the process from 2016 with the approval of an expansion of Kerteminde Biogas, which then mayor Hans Luunbjerg (V) owns.
In May this year, the small Kjerteminde Avis dug up the case, and two legal experts strongly criticized the proceedings. Kurt Klaudi Klausen, a professor of public administration at the University of Southern Denmark, spoke in bold words: "incompetence, incompetence, corruption. It affects the entire legitimacy of the municipality".
In early November, a preliminary legal investigation was carried out, which concluded that Luunbjerg, who was incompetent in his own biogas case, had not abused his position, but that he should have let the city council decide on his competence.
On this basis, Luunbjerg himself believed that "the idea of talking to my city council colleagues was not among the advice I received. In Kerteminde, we have not had the practice of a mayor telling the rest of the city council that he/she was now applying for one thing or another. I therefore just sent my application completely neutrally."
Mixing up
Now the entire investigation by the Attorney General is complete, and the municipality, which has since had a new municipal director, has placed the quite visible on the front page of its website. And it goes into detail - among a wide range of planning and environmental elements - about what constitutes good practice when a mayor himself has a case running in the municipal system.
It appears, for example, that Luunbjerg should have avoided any confusion about his role in the case by avoiding that he physically and through the use of e-mails mixed up his visit to the municipality with his application case.
The Chamber Advocate emphasizes that in the cases there is no basis to believe that he, as mayor, has participated in, contributed to or attempted to influence the case processing in an improper manner or by abusing his position.
The application case was not decided politically, but exclusively administratively.
And it is elaborated on how "the employees in the municipality must be considered as derivedly incompetent as a result of the mayor's personal incompetence, and the municipality should therefore have ensured that it was not the individual case handlers, but rather the municipal council, who made the decisions after a recommendation from the administration."
Not a practice for minutes
Thus we introduced the technical term "derivedly incompetent", which has never before been mentioned in DK Nyt. It is described as a special form of incapacity, "which may exist if the head of a hierarchical authority is affected by personal incapacity, and there is no independent deputy in the authority."
It also appears from the investigation that several meetings on the matter took place in the mayor's office, and that no minutes were taken from the meetings. Both parts immediately speak for "that correct case processing is not ensured", but this is obviously not given much weight, since there was, among other things, a lack of meeting rooms, and it is clear with regard to minutes that this was not the municipality's practice at the time.
But it is clearly stated that Hans Luunbjerg himself should have taken measures to ensure that the municipal employees were not put in a difficult conflict of loyalty that could affect their case processing.
In the picture is that he corresponded with municipal employees from two private e-mail addresses, but the majority from his e-mail address as mayor and municipal council member.
Moved several times
The mayor - or rather the biogas owner - also moved several times for a decision: on May 4, 2015, May 26, 2015, July 1, 2015 and June 27, 2017, he wrote to municipal employees and moved to get a timetable for the municipality's processing of the application, just as back in February 2014, he had requested an employee in the administration by email for an informal talk about the applications he was considering.
In the final assessment, the Attorney General writes that there are legal shortcomings in the basis for the permits, but that after a specific assessment they can be maintained for good reason. Partly because the mayor and employees made an effort to process the case correctly, partly because of the significant loss of value and the time that has elapsed.
Regarding the loss of value, according to TV2 Fyn in 2016, Kerteminde Biogas had a deficit of DKK 621,000, and in the accounts for 2021, after the expansion, a profit of DKK 12.2 million before tax.
Hans Luunbjerg resigned as mayor in 2017 and resigned from the city council. The then municipal director Tim Jeppesen resigned in June 2020. Today, Inger Marie Vynne is the municipal director.
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