A Greenpeace employee in Amsterdam has been sacked after losing 28.3 million kroner – some of which stems from Danish donors – on foreign currency speculation.
Greenpeace’s Nordic wing, which sends a third of all its donations to Greenpeace International, confirmed the news, stating that a smaller part of Danish donations were lost in the scandal.
“It’s very unfortunate that a human error and an internal procedure failure has led to the loss of money that private citizens from all over the world donated to Greenpeace,” Lone Buchardt, the head of fundraising at Greenpeace Denmark, said in a press release.
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Auditor investigating
The environmental advocate organisation has denied that the employee in question was attempting to enrich himself, but said that it could understand if its donors were disappointed in them.
“The person who made this bad decision has been fired, and an external auditor is making a considerable and impartial investigation into what went wrong and what we can do so that it doesn’t happen again,” Buchardt said.
Greenpeace’s Nordic wing is supported by about 150,000 donors who contribute about 120 million kroner a year. Some 37 million kroner has been sent to the organisation’s international department, and the expected Danish losses from the speculation are 185,000 kroner – half a percent of the total.
