Missing wife of Norwegian millionaire appears to have been kidnapped; police reveal $10M ransom demand

LONDON -- The wife of one of the richest men in Norway is believed to have been kidnapped after police revealed her husband received a note asking for over $10 million in the cryptocurrency Monero as ransom.

Anne-Elisabeth Flakevic Hagen, wife of Norwegian real estate investor and electric company owner Tom Hagen, went missing on Oct. 31 of last year. Hagen found a note left on the couple's home asking for the ransom, but police did not disclose when specifically the note was found.

Information regarding Flakevic's disappearance was not made public before because Hagen received a note from the suspected kidnappers threatening to kill his wife if he got the police involved, Norwegian newspaper VG reported.

However, police are now making the information public as their investigation has yielded no results, and hope the video surveillance footage they released on Thursday will help them get new leads on the case.

The video is of an area outside of Hagen’s office building.

“We have access to surveillance video showing persons moving on the outside of the building on the day in question,” Chief Police Investigator Tommy Broske said in a press conference Wednesday.

In the video, two people are seen walking outside the building within 30 minutes of each other on the day Flakevic Hagen went missing. A third person, a cyclist, passes by one of the people standing outside the building. Broske said that police are searching for all of them.

Tom Hagen was featured on a list by Norwegian magazine Kapital as the 172nd wealthiest person in the country in 2018, with a reported fortune of $200 million, according to the Associated Press.

“Finally, I want to reiterate that we do not know where Anne-Elisabeth Hagen is kept hidden. Neither do we know if she has been kept at just one location since 31 October. The hiding place could be within as well as outside Norway’s borders,” Broske said.