The Ministry of Finance has rejected suspicions that stock exchange-sensitive inside information was astray before the government proposed a resource rent tax on aquaculture earlier this week.
The opposition Conservative Party and Progress Party have not made a commitment in recent days. After an extensive flood of rumours about the resource rent tax for aquaculture in the last week, including editorials in VG and DN, there have been many indications that stock exchange-sensitive inside information had been leaked from the government and the Ministry of Finance.
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Knowledge
“To me, it is quite obvious that someone has had knowledge of this, knowledge they should not have had, the Conservative Party’s parliamentary representative Ove Trellevik told SalmonBusiness.
“It is natural for the government to step in and provide an explanation as to whether this could be accidental or not. They are the ones who have the overview of who has known what, and when,” the Progress Party’s Sivert Bjørnstad added.
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Now the Ministry of Finance has gone through its routines, and has concluded that there is no reason to suspect any illegal sharing of stock exchange-sensitive inside information related to the proposal for resource rent tax.
Cecilie Skjennald. Photo: Ministry of Finance
No basis
“The Ministry of Finance has treated the matter of the introduction of resource rent tax on the aquaculture industry as inside information. Those involved were made aware that the case was considered inside information and what obligations and prohibitions this entailed. In the Ministry of Finance, we often work with particularly politically sensitive and stock exchange-sensitive matters, and the employees are therefore used to handling such information,” Cecilie Skjennald, senior adviser at the communications unit in the Ministry of Finance, told SalmonBusiness.
“We have no grounds to suspect illegal sharing of inside information,” she concluded.
