Housing refugees is big business for Swedish pop tycoon, Bert Karlsson

Housing refugees is big business for Swedish pop tycoon, Bert Karlsson

A Swedish pop music tycoon turned TV celebrity who once founded an anti-immigration political party might well be the most unlikely beneficiary of Europe’s migration crisis.

But as long as the country is taking in the most asylum seekers per capita of any in Europe, Bert Karlsson is happy to earn a fortune from the government for housing them.

Sweden’s answer to Simon Cowell, Karlsson founded a record label and later appeared as a ubiquitous judge on reality TV talent shows.

He launched an anti-immigration political party that briefly held the balance of power in parliament before flaming out in the mid-1990s, and still says Sweden needs to spend less on migrants.

But that hasn’t stopped his company, Jokarjo, from housing around 5,000 migrants at 30 sites, becoming the leading supplier of temporary asylum seeker housing to Sweden’s government, a business he expects to double this year after tripling in 2014.

“I’m the best in Sweden at entrepreneurship,” he proclaims, sounding a bit like Donald Trump, a figure whose anti-establishment moxie he says he admires, as he speeds from his native town Skara to his first and biggest site for refugees.

The venture is a reminder that the European migration crisis is also big business, from the Turkish market traders selling life vests on the beach in Bodrum, to the Balkan coach operators selling bus tickets from border to border.

With one hand driving his Saab – plastered with stickers from his lakeside summer resort – and the other holding an iPhone discussing business, Karlsson says he spotted the need for immigrant housing early and set out three years ago to provide it at half the price the state was paying at the time.

Sweden, a country of just 9.8 million people, received 81,000 refugees last year and is on course to top that this year. The government has pencilled in 40 billion Swedish crowns ($4.8 billion) to spend on immigration and integration, around 4 percent of Sweden’s total budget for 2016.

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Having run out of apartments for asylum seekers, the Swedish Migration Agency has been paying companies to house them in buildings like unused hotels and hostels.

The growing field has attracted some of the country’s major names, including the Wallenbergs, Sweden’s most prominent industrialist family. But none has taken a bigger slice of the pie than Karlsson’s Jokarjo, which billed the migration agency 170 million crowns for temporary shelter so far this year alone, more than three times as much as its biggest competitor.

The migration agency believes housing for asylum seekers will cost 3 billion Swedish crowns this year, not including the cost of looking after unaccompanied children.

– Reuters