Artist Odd Nerdrum pardoned, and avoids punishment

Artist Odd Nerdrum.Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB scanpix

Tax-dodger, Odd Nerdrum has been pardoned, thus avoiding imprisonment, reported Dagens Næringsliv (DN) newspaper.

Nerdrum was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison for tax fraud in 2014. Eight months of the sentence was conditional. He had failed to pay NOK 7 million in revenue from ‘image sales’.

Sought pardon twice
Now the artist is pissed off. Nerdrum delivered his first pardon application in 2016, but it was denied. Nerdrum then made a fresh attempt, which eventually got through by Royal Decree on the 22nd of September, Nerdrum’s communications adviser, Anders Bortne, reported in an email to DN.

‘Everything is now handled for Nerdrum in terms of tax matters, and he continues to paint like the free soul that he is,’ wrote Nerdrum’s lawyer, John Christian Elden.

Milder punishment

In 2012, the artist was sentenced to two years and ten months in jail for tax fraud by failing to pay 14 million kroner in taxation, but the verdict was squashed due to a case processing error.

In 2014, he was found guilty of some of the accusations he was convicted of in 2012, but received a lighter punishment because he paid some of the amount of tax he owed.
Clemency processes are handled, in the first instance, by the Ministry of Justice.

If an application is approved by the ministry, it is the King in State Council, that makes the formal decision. Thus, it is unclear if the rest of the proles, who are not ‘free souls’, or are in some peculiar manner less ‘free’ than Odd Nerdrum, can expect the same degree of clemency in similar situations.

Source: NRK / Norway Today