Nyborg mayor avoids supervisory case over alleged law breaches

The supervisory authority at Denmark’s Appeals Board has decided not to open a case against Nyborg Mayor Kenneth Muhs of the Liberal Party, DR reports. The authority found no basis to conclude that he broke the law by failing to inform the city council about serious problems in the municipality’s social services department.

The decision follows more than two years of investigation into an October 2021 meeting between Muhs and Nyborg’s citizen adviser. At the meeting, the adviser told the mayor about serious issues in the social services area.

Several administrative law experts previously told DR that Muhs had breached his duty to provide information by failing to share the concerns with his fellow council members.

Authority disagrees with experts

However, the supervisory authority said there was no basis for concluding that the mayor’s failure to inform the city council was contrary to the law, including the Local Government Act.

It therefore decided that no further action was necessary.

The authority highlighted several factors in its decision. Shortly after the meeting with the citizen adviser, Muhs informed the municipal chief executive about the problems and asked him to “take the necessary steps”.

The authority also noted that, at the time, there were no guidelines setting out how the citizen adviser should inform the city council about significant errors or failings.

The citizen adviser’s statutes have since been revised, and the procedure is now clearly stated, according to the authority.

Professor stands by criticism

Frederik Waage, a professor of public administration at the University of Southern Denmark, was among the experts who previously concluded that the mayor had broken the law.

After reading the decision, Waage said he still believed it was a serious mistake that the Nyborg city council had not received the information.

“But based on the new information from the Appeals Board, I must also acknowledge that the communication from the citizen adviser may not have been completely clear, and that it therefore cannot unambiguously be blamed on the mayor alone that things went wrong,” he told DR.

He said there had been circumstances that worked in the mayor’s favour.

Dispute centred on 2021 meeting

The dispute centres on a meeting at the mayor’s office in Nyborg on 7 October 2021. The municipality’s then citizen adviser described a series of serious problems in social services, including cases that were going in circles, major concerns about professional standards, numerous procedural errors and legal memorandums that were not being used.

The adviser also told the mayor about several serious individual cases and said he was “deeply concerned about the citizens’ legal security in the area, as well as the municipality’s reputation externally”.

Muhs informed the municipal chief executive about the meeting but did not pass the information on to the rest of the city council. The council was not informed until the citizen adviser presented an annual report in March 2022.

In June 2024, the Social Democrats, the Socialist People’s Party and the Conservatives on Nyborg City Council asked the supervisory authority to investigate the matter. They did so shortly after the Liberal Party, which had an absolute majority on the council at the time, rejected a proposal for an external legal assessment of the events.

Social Democratic council member Martin Stenmann welcomed the decision but said he still believed the mayor should have shared his knowledge of the problems with the city council.

Stenmann also said the information had emerged shortly before the 2021 local elections and that, if the council had learned about it in October, the specialised social services area would have become an election campaign issue. He said this could also have brought earlier attention to the serious failures and case-processing problems later identified by the auditing firm BDO in a report published in December 2023.