Brixtofte made headlines with a highly untraditional sale-and-lease-back model where the municipality sold buildings and facilities to private companies and rented them back.

This scheme allowed the municipality to have one of the lowest tax rates in Denmark at the same time as spending a huge amount of money on various welfare programs.

A lot of prestigious building projects were initiated such as a sports arena and marina completely out of proportion to what one would expect from a city of this size.

Municipal employees reported that the charismatic mayor had over years shown increasing signs of alcoholism and established an autocratic, intimidating climate at the town hall.

His lawyer then announced an appeal to the Supreme Court which would, however, only be granted in exceptional circumstances and can only affect the length of the sentence, not the guilty verdict.

Brixtofte's right-hand man, Leif Frimand Jensen, was also sentenced two years in prison, but it was made conditional due to his bad health.

On top of that came increasing rent costs from the previous sales and eventually the municipality was forced to abandon the extraordinary welfare programs and dramatically raise its taxes.

In the local elections of 2005, now for the newly merged Furesø municipality, Brixtofte ran his own list, Velfærdspartiet ('Welfare Party') and was re-elected with 4.8% of the votes.

In 2004 he briefly joined Centrum-Demokraterne,[6] a minor party that had not been represented in Parliament since 2001, but left when he was not allowed to run as a parliamentary candidate until the criminal case was resolved.

[7] On 9 February 2007, the day after his prison sentence ended, Brixtofte was denied entry to the United States upon arriving at a New York City airport.

On 28 May 2008, the Interior Ministry's Board of Eligibility stripped Brixtofte of his right to be an elected political representative due to the supreme court's verdict in the sponsorship case.

[10] On Wednesday 6 August 2008 Peter Brixtofte began serving his two-year sentence in Horserød Statsfængsel open prison in the northeast of Zealand.