Two high-level executives of Swedish e-commerce startup Klarna are on their way home after the New York County district attorney agreed to dismiss charges of felony sexual assault that they had faced since early this month.
Niklas Adalberth and Jens Saltin were arrested on charges that they attacked a 19-year-old woman. Adalberth is co-founder and COO, while Saltin is Netherlands country manager of the Swedish electronic payments company.
The two executives had been on leave from Klarna since news of their arrests broke. On Tuesday, the company forwarded a statement reading, “As we have been expecting all along, the accusations brought against our employees have now been proven entirely unfounded and all charges have been dismissed. Our employees did nothing wrong, did not break any law and should thus never have ended up in this very unfortunate situation. We now leave this incident behind us and welcome back our employees to their central roles within the company.”
Attorneys for Adalberth and Saltin said they were delighted that the district attorney had agreed to dismiss all charges against their clients. “We have maintained from the outset that this case was based on a single, false and entirely baseless allegation that was not corroborated by any forensic, scientific, video or any other witness testimony,” they said in a statement. They added that the records in the case have been sealed.
Klarna was founded in 2005 by Adalberth and two friends from the Stockholm School of Economics, according to its website. It now has more than 600 employees and handles payments for more than 14,000 merchants, according to a December 2011 press release. It operates in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Israel in addition to Sweden.