Fugitive Christen Ager-Hanssen loses luxury watches to bailiff

Bankrupt fugitive Christen Ager-Hanssen has been forced to surrender nine luxury watches after Swedish authorities caught up with the Norwegian nightmare at a Stockholm hotel.

On November 4, Swedish media outlet Expressen reported that police and agents from Kronofogden—the Swedish Enforcement Authority, aka the crown’s debt collector—ambushed Norwegian national Ager-Hanssen “a few weeks ago” at Stockholm’s Story Hotel, where he’d booked a room. The agents were acting on a non-public court order authorizing the seizure of Ager-Hanssen’s assets to comply with a default judgment issued against Ager-Hanssen by a Norwegian court.

Armed with a ‘declaration of enforcement,’ the Swedish authorities reportedly lay in wait for several days before invading Ager-Hanssen’s personal space early one morning. Following a search of his room, the agents confiscated nine luxury watches—including several Rolexes, two Hublot Classics, and a Patek Philippe Nautilus—worth an estimated SEK3.5 million (US$365,000). Ager-Hanssen reportedly tried to claim some of the watches were fakes in an apparent bid to prevent their seizure.

Ager-Hanssen told the agents that he will appeal the seizure, but as usual, he has neither the facts nor the law on his side. He has also never followed through on his threats to file appeals in any of his legal cases, given that his actual participation in the legal process would ultimately lead to his incarceration.

His inability/unwillingness to pay his debts led to Ager-Hanssen being declared bankrupt in the United Kingdom, which led to a similar bankruptcy ruling in his native Norway this spring. (Technically his third, after a 2005 bankruptcy in Sweden from an unpaid £1.5 million back-tax bill that resulted in the authorities seizing his ‘villa’ in Kullavik and selling it at auction.)

The U.K. court also sentenced Ager-Hanssen to 10 months in prison for contempt of court and “deliberate” breaches of court orders related to his theft of physical and intellectual property from his former employer, blockchain technology firm nChain. [Disclosure: CoinGeek’s owner is an nChain shareholder.].

Instead of paying up, Ager-Hanssen and his wife, Caroline, fled the U.K. for his native Norway. He then fled Norway following the Norwegian bankruptcy ruling and a police raid on his residence seeking the items he improperly took from nChain. He’s been laying low ever since, and Expressen reporter Karin Sörbring tweeted on November 3 that Ager-Hanssen has been telling everyone he’s broke and is relying on the charity of friends and relatives.

Like a hapless crook in a 1940’s film noir, Ager-Hanssen was ultimately undone by a dame. In this case, his wife Caroline, who married into money before hooking up with Ager-Hanssen. (The allowance she gives him from her personal funds is believed to be Ager-Hanssen’s sole source of income these days.)

Caroline gave away her husband’s location when she traveled from Monaco to Stockholm. At the airport, Caroline cited her husband’s hotel as the address at which she’d be staying. This information was forwarded to Kronofogden, and Caroline reportedly beat a retreat back to the south of France as Ager-Hanssen’s room was being rumbled lest her cash be next on the seizure list.

Ager-Hanssen might attempt to justify traveling with nearly as many watches as he has fingers as a stylish determination to match his wrist jewelry with his suits. A more likely explanation is that he needs the watches to further the illusion that he’s a wealthy businessman (wearing fake watches) when meeting with his potential victims. He also needs to travel with portable items of value that, in a pinch, can be pawned for the cash he needs to get to the next destination on his ‘stay one step ahead’ European tour.

No laughing matter

Ager-Hanssen’s U.K. bankruptcy order was extended “indefinitely” in July, breaking with tradition that would normally see the order discharged within a year of its imposition. It’s likely that his failure to report and serve his custodial sentence played a role in this extension.

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How we got here

Ager-Hanssen has had countless brushes with the law, all of which he claims are the result of the many, many people he’s wronged improperly weaponizing the justice system against him. And yet, Ager-Hanssen never sticks around long enough to make these claims in person, in court, before a judge, instead choosing to perform his latest “I’m the real victim here” speech only after he’s safely outside a court’s territorial reach.

His current legal woes stem from his attempt at a boardroom coup at nChain in October 2023, which was uncovered before it could be fully implemented. Ager-Hanssen’s hastily concocted Plan B was to take as much of nChain’s physical and intellectual property with him as he fled the scene.

nChain filed legal claims against Ager-Hanssen in the U.K., where he was then based. These claims were upheld by the courts as Ager-Hanssen failed to mount a defense, leading the judge overseeing the suit to remark that Ager-Hanssen “has not participated in these proceedings in any meaningful way.”

Ager-Hanssen claimed to have complied with court orders to return nChain’s property, a claim nChain rejected as false. Indeed, the 2025 raid on his residence in Stavanger, Norway, was intended to retrieve the purloined digital devices that Ager-Hanssen claimed he no longer had.

It was later revealed that, before he was hounded out of nChain, Ager-Hanssen tried to curry favor with the U.K. Tory party by lavishing them with £70,000 in company cash (a donation that nChain never approved) in the hope that the party would sign a deal with a private venture he was cooking up.

Ager-Hanssen’s attempt to buy his way into the Tories’ good graces ultimately failed, mirroring nearly every other business venture the Norwegian ne’er-do-well has involved himself with.

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A litany of greed, ineptitude, and failure

Ager-Hanssen’s long list of business failures and scandals dates back to the dot-com days, including the botched attempt by his VC group Cognition to acquire Canadian software firm OpenText (using a Swedish pension fund’s money).

That debacle, which included rumors that Ager-Hanssen was shorting OpenText stock while he was trying to acquire the company, resulted in Swedish pensioners losing millions. A decade and a half later, a former Cognition exec recalled Ager-Hanssen thusly: “I have yet to come across anyone else in business that I consider equally full of sh*t.”

In 2007, Ager-Hanssen’s involvement in Swedish low-cost airline FlyMe Europe led to the company’s bankruptcy, with a consumer watchdog saying the airline had been looted from within. Swedish media noted at the time that it was “a mystery that anyone would invest their money in companies where Ager-Hanssen has any influence whatsoever.”

And yet, in 2017, Ager-Hanssen’s Custos Group acquired Swedish media outlet Metro, only for Metro to file for restructuring two years later due to $6 million in unpaid bills.

Also in 2017, Custos made a play to acquire the U.K.’s Johnston Press plc and install himself as chairman. However, the takeover tanked because Ager-Hanssen failed to read the fine print in Johnston’s bond agreements calling for immediate repayment of over £200 million in debt if the board was ousted.

As a Swedish lawyer put it in the wake of the FlyMe debacle: “Ager-Hanssen is an extremely polished and smart guy who knows company law like the back of his hand. He is happy to enter with a minority stake in a limited company. Then he creates pure hell, complains about all the lack of formality. Eventually, everyone gets so tired of him and wants to throw him out. Then he offers to sell his share at a huge premium, or he offers to buy the others’ shares at a discount. Regardless, he leaves the business with a profit.”

A profit that he will attempt to hide from creditors as he skips from one jurisdiction to the next. But everyone’s luck runs out eventually, and this Scandinavian scofflaw’s hourglass is down to its final grains.

As his ‘cry wolf’ one-dimensional shakedown runs out of runway, with no one left to “blow the whistle” to this time, the self-proclaimed ‘street fighter’ might actually start shedding some real tears as he looks back on his wasted life of inept criminality.

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