About this site
This web site is an inquiry into a self-styled humanitarian organisation, the Teachers Group, that is also a wealthy, secretive and mysterious international business. The Teachers Group runs Humana and many other supposed charities. The Teachers Group was founded in Denmark in 1969-70 and is now active in at least 30 countries,, and possibly as many as 50. According to a recent statement by Danish police, it has estimated worldwide assets of $860 million.
This web site was founded in 1999 as a journalistic endeavour and has expanded since with the support of many informants and ‘victims of the Teachers Group’.
We receive no funding of any kind.
Click here to see who we are
Click here to join our team or give us financial support
What is ‘Tvind’?
‘Tvind’ is a name more or less interchangeable with ‘The Teachers Group’ and is just another name for the same organisation, commonly used to describe its more public face. The site was named Tvind Alert because that was the term we knew in 1999. Tvind is actually a place near Ulfborg in western Denmark and the Tvind School Centre there is one of the organisation’s bases. ‘Tvind’ in Danish means ’small stream’.
Humana – charity or scam?
This was the question this web site set out to answer in 1999 following the British Charity Commission’s decision to strip Humana in the UK of its charity status, along with two small independent boarding schools. This is what kicked the ball rolling. Journalistic inquiry at the time revealed there were many disturbing reasons for the Charity Commission’s action, including ’serious financial impropriety’.
The scope of the web site has since spread to all other Teachers Group activities around the world including many related clothing enterprises, schools and colleges, ‘foreign aid’ projects, businesses, trading companies, land acquisitions, farming, forestry, ships, offshore companies and Swiss bank accounts.
Since 1999 we have received thousands of emails, many offering inside information, and there have been numerous articles in the media. But very few journalists have taken the trouble to do more than skim the surface of the story, or investigate the Teachers group. Outside Denmark, where Tvind is a national scandal, there has been very little official interest or action of any kind – despite the international nature of the organisation or the millions currently being given to it by governments.
The main purpose of this web site now is to alert the public, governments and funding bodies around the world and make the Teachers Group a matter of international concern – not just a little problem for Scandinavians.
The founder – Amdi Petersen
The man at the heart of the puzzle is 69-year old former Danish schoolteacher Amdi Petersen. As a young firebrand activist, Petersen founded the Teachers Group in southern Denmark in 1969. It was then regarded as a model of communal and cooperative endeavour. He was a charismatic leader and originally a hero of the left in the 1970s.
Petersen mysteriously ‘retired’ from public life in 1979 and was ‘missing’ for 22 years. It has now been well established that, during this period, Petersen continued to covertly run the organisation from various locations, and almost certainly subverted the original ‘humanitarian’ mission to create a complex business and financial web, using classic hot money and asset laundering techniques to build a business empire based on property and clothes.
In around 2000 Danish police issued a warrant for his arrest and in 2002, he was arrested by the FBI in the United States, extradited to Denmark and put on trial for tax fraud and financial crimes.
Petersen is the founder and undisputed leader of the Teachers Group: what he says is the law. Although acquitted of fraud at this first trial, the Danish public prosecutor announced an appeal and brought new charges. Before charges could technically be served, Petersen and a small group of friends fled Denmark. He is now believed to be living in exile, probably travelling between such places as Mexico, Brazil, Belize and Zimbabwe.
Click here to find out more about Amdi Petersen
A cult active around the world
The Teachers Group is a self-styled humanitarian organisation, but it is also widely regarded as a cult. Its pyramidal structure, strict hierarchy, all-powerful leader, millennial goals, secretive nature and hostility to outsiders all match classic descriptions of a cult. Under the name ‘Tvind’ or ‘Humana’, it is listed as a cult by the French and Belgian governments and many cult watchdog groups around the world.
This is supported by anecdotal evidence from many insiders, ex-members and ex-volunteers who have emailed this site describing ‘brainwashing’ or ‘mind control’.
Click here for more cult information
Click here to read the database maintained by Rick Ross
Stories and accusations
The moment this site first appeared in 1999, we began receiving emails from complete strangers outlining their personal experiences at Tvind schools, as volunteers and inside the Teachers Group. The first was from Steen Thomsen, a member for 25 years who quit the organisation in 2000. His account, ‘Concerning Tvind’, is published here in Danish, English and Italian.
The flood of stories has not stopped since. They come from disenchanted students, volunteers and ‘development instructors’; from people who feel trapped inside Teachers Group or who have recently ‘escaped’; and recently, we have had a number from businesses people complaining about unsatisfactory dealings with Teachers Group companies.
Click here for a taste of some of our readers’ stories
A multinational business empire
With property, investments and business interests around the world, the Teachers Group acts like a multinational corporation and strives to keep its financial affairs secret, tax-efficient and profitable. Over 20 years it has erected a complex network of interrelated companies, business start-ups, trusts, offshore companies and Swiss foundations that is nearly impenetrable to outsiders.
Amdi Petersen is once reported to have said that he would create a financial system that would ‘tip as much money as possible into the Teachers Group wheelbarrow’ – or words to that effect. He also said this system would be so complex that only a handful of people would understand it. Effectively, it is a system for moving money away from charity to the Teachers Group.
We are penetrating this web. Informants have described a financial directorate called ‘TG Economy’ at the very highest level of the Teachers Group, that co-ordinates financial affairs and issues directives. It controls key offshore companies located in tax havens such as the Caymans, Channel Islands and Switzerland. The Teachers Group places scores of its members as directors and shareholders in its bewildering array of nested companies. We have so far found more than 200 of them and are continuing to investigate.
Click here to view the Danish police report
Click here to view our basic A-Z of company names
‘It’s All About Money’ – exploiting foreign aid
‘It’s all about money’ is a phrase often used about the Teachers Group. So is the phrase ‘Tvind money-go-round’. We believe the Teachers Group is money-driven, not primarily humanitarian.
Our research certainly suggests that it loses no opportunity to make as much money as possible for itself, exploiting even its own volunteers and poor farmers, while giving as little as possible to humanitarian work and avoiding tax.
Here are some ways the Teachers Group makes money: used clothes; rents on its schools (paid to its own property company), advance fees paid by students but not refunded if they leave; street collections by volunteers; school fees paid or boarding by local councils; school and tuition fees in developing countries; rental for plots of land to farmers; profits from commercial fruit crops; timber trading; furniture manufacture; donations from charitable trusts, businesses, and governments.
The Teachers Group makes large sums by exploiting its own members working in Africa – ‘project leaders’ who on paper are paid sizeable salaries, but never see the money. Because of an agreement signed with the Teachers Group, these people pay back most of their salaries to the Teachers Group – where it disappears into the ‘money machine’.
Tvind’s leaders are caught in luxury
The leaders of the Teachers Group have a lot of money to spend and extravagant tastes. In 2001, journalists discovered a $6 million secret hideaway bought by the Teachers Group for Petersen and his closest circle of friends, on a private ‘billionaire’s retreat’ off Miami, Fisher Island. Petersen could have been living there for ten years.
The Danish newspaper also reported that Petersen had a lavish golf club membership and luxury car. A $6 million luxury ocean-going yacht, the Butterfly McQueen, moored nearby, also proved to belong to the Teachers Group – for the leaders’ use.
The Teachers group is still spending: in 2008 the Teachers Group opened a $10 million private retreat in the Mexican desert, at San Juan de las Pulgas, that appears to be an exclusive resort for selected members. It includes an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a cathedral-like meeting hall, library, and gymnasium.
Click here for more on Fisher Island
Click here to find out about the Butterfly McQueen
Click here to see slideshow of the retreat in Mexico
Police investigations
Danish police began investigating the Teachers Group in around 1999 following sensational media reports. These included a television interview with a former Teachers Group volunteer who confessed to having ‘laundered’ hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid money in cash from Angola to bank accounts in Denmark.
In February 2001, Danish police mounted a dawn raid on seven Teachers Group properties. They confiscated computers and were able to access tens of thousands of pages of financial information. On the basis of this trove they charged Petersen and several others with financial crimes and tax evasion.
Belgian police also laid similar charges against several Teachers Group members at about the same time, although the case did not reach court.
Click here to read Britte Junge’s account of money transfers
Fraud charges brought to court
In 2003, Amdi Petersen and seven other Teachers Group leaders went on trial in Denmark for alleged financial crimes and tax evasion. The case was brought by the Danish police Department of Serious Economic Crime and lasted more than three years. The prosecution made complex allegations of illegal money transfers between a wealthy Teachers Group charity in Denmark and bank accounts abroad, where around $25 million was said to have been used to buy a property in Brazil.
The verdicts – and retrial
In August 2006, the lower court in Aarhus, western Denmark found one defendant guilty, but acquitted the others. The Danish government immediately announced an appeal against most of the defendants. However, when court officers tried to serve the necessary legal papers, a few weeks later, they found that five of the six defendants had secretly fled from Denmark.
Amdi Petersen and four others are now believed to be living abroad as fugitives from justice, most likely at Teachers Group properties far from Europe – in Mexico, Zimbabwe, Belize or Brazil.
Danish police have asked other police forces to help locate them and requested they be detained if found. However since legal papers were not served, they cannot be placed on Interpol’s international ‘wanted’ list or made the subject of an international arrest warrant. However one of the defendants, has since been served with legal documents and is expected to be put on trial.
The sixth defendant, Poul Joergensen, was put on trial in Denmark. In January 2009, he was found guilty of tax fraud and embezzlement and jailed for two and a half years.
Our newly updated dossier will include brief information on more than 200 companies, offshore accounts and trusts, past and present, operated by the Teachers Group
From a list of several hundred Teachers Group members, we have selected about 30 that we think are key people because their names crop up so often as company directors, shareholders or trustees in Teachers Group enterprises.
>>> The Top Thirty Tvind Teachers
>>> Friendly links: other sites like this one
>>> The Teachers Group on the web
>>> Alternative volunteering organisations
Ask a few questions, take some video, send us some photographs or write an article for this site – if we like what you send us, we’ll publish it. (We especially need up to date photographs of clothes boxes, shops and inside schools.) Send us something.
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The Aid Alert Foundation
Email us on feedback@tvindalert.com
Phone us on 07775 531612
Last edited 25th February 2010
