Danny Hayes - Serial Entrepreneur Involved with the City of Bodo in Norway - Discusses Difficulty in Recovering a Professional Reputation After Defamatory Reporting

We have written recently about some of the details involved in Danny Hayes, Borealis Engineering, and their involvement with the city of Bodo, Norway. Danny Hayes and Borealis have worked tirelessly in the past to attract high-quality financing for the city's technology projects that could bring extensive technology development and attractive revenue streams to the city. Unfortunately, both parties have been the victims of aggressive and false reporting and a media blitz from competitors intended to destroy their relationship. It can be very difficult to rehabilitate business and personal relationships after such a false attack. As American writer, Mark Twain put it, "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

Especially in smaller cities, reporting in local newspapers carries some automatic assumptions about truth and reliability. For matters involving local government, local papers are often the only "official" source of public information that impacts opinion and decision making by elected officials.

Business owners and financial developers rely heavily on their reputation and the personal relationships they form with everyone they interact with. Untruthful attacks against a person's reputation can have profound effects on their professional relationships. For people who are not native to the area (and certainly those who are from foreign countries), reputational damage from false and unfair attacks can be virtually impossible to cure. Personal and corporate branding takes time and hard work to build up but can be destroyed instantaneously by lies or misrepresentations. Even when the law provides a cause of action for libel or slander, the damages allowed by are often insufficient. After all, how can a court judgment restore public perception? 

When competitors attack dishonestly in the forum of local government, the situation is even more difficult. The same people who press a false narrative in the press are also often likely to push their campaign directly to government officials and elected representatives outside of the public view. 

Many times, the only effective way to handle a defamatory press blitz is by making the necessary effort to directly communicate the truth to other reporters, public influencers, and government officials directly. Almost everyone acknowledges that even if a particular business proposal is destroyed by falsehoods, it is important to support the targeted person in their effort to protect their image and reputation to the extent possible.

In the subject of this case of defamation, the target was Danny Hayes and his company, Borealis Engineering, a local Norway company specifically created by Hayes along with local persons to promote the development of a $500 million data center project in Bodo and associated technology projects for Bobo's smart city initiative. Hayes proposed a joint venture with Bodo that would have directed 10 percent of the proposed data center's revenues to the city without the need of direct capital investment.

Danny Hayes and his associates began working on this project along with Norwegian attorney Balbir Bindra who was charged with forming the necessary business entities to conduct business. Other local stakeholders included Trond Larsen and Kjell Ivar Hansen Rosnes. Bindra soon undertook to take Hayes and his associates out of the project by dissolving the original entity in favor of a new shell designed for his benefit along with Larsen and Hansen. They acted to dissolve the original company, Borealis Industries, in order to form a directly competing company, Arctic Capacity. Hayes and his group were excluded from the distribution of the original company's assets and formed a new Norwegian company, Borealis Engineering, in an effort to continue moving forward with the joint venture with Bodo.

Larsen and Hansen soon contacted personal contacts in the local newspaper Bodo Nu, Markus Jensen and Geir Are Jensen to start a media smear campaign against Borealis Engineering, Hayes, and his associates. Hayes personally became the focal point of the attack designed to poison him in the eyes of Bodo officials and residents.

Through their press contacts and accomplices, Larsen and Hansen made several false statements of fact about Danny Hayes. They initially spread the untrue story that Hayes improperly accessed and used the corporate funds of the original company, Borealis Industries. They also publicly spread false information and prompted the publication of false information about the circumstances involved in the dissolution of their original Norwegian company.  Eventually, the sheer amount of false reporting and rumors spread led the city of Bodo and its partners to terminate their project with Hayes and Borealis Engineering.

The reporters for Bodo Nu and the other media outlets that picked up the sensationalized story lacked the general knowledge of international tech capital formation methods to incite suspicion and distrust of Hayes for the purpose of promoting the agenda of Larsen and Hansen. Especially pernicious was the use of stereotyping of American businesspeople and investors in order to discredit Hayes.

In the matter of Arctic Capacity, the Bodo Nu, and Danny Hayes and Borealis Engineering, the truth about the aggressive smear campaign in the media came to light through the responsible and thorough reporting work of Norway's national public broadcasting agency, NRK.

Danny Hayes continues to support the interests of the city of Bodo and its citizens through the local football club,

The technology initiatives of the city of Bodo in every way and encourage the city to continue to pursue attractive and financially lucrative projects on behalf of its citizens and the region.