The winding-up committee of Landsbanki is now in the final stages of preparing a number of cases against former management and the owners according to Morgunbladid. The amount that the board asks for as reimbursement amounts to 0.75 billon USD (90 billion ISK). The board also asks for eight billion ISK insurance payment, because of criminal activity on behalf of the former management of the bank.

The winding-up committee last summer hired a team of specialists from Deloitte in Britain to investigate the bank before the October 2008 crash. Herdís Hallmarsdóttir, who is on the winding-up committee says that the investigation is making good progress, but is not yet finished. . . .

Two of the three former owners of Landsbanki, Björgólfur Gudmundsson and Magnús Thorsteinsson are now legally bankrupt. The third owner, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, is still liquid. The CEOs of the bank were Sigurjón Árnason and Halldór J. Kristjánsson.  15-May-10.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16567&ew_0_a_id=362355

Just now the governments of Iceland, the UK and the Netherlands signed an agreement on the repayment scheme of Landsbanki’s Icesave deposits. Negotiations were believed to be at standstill and therefore this sudden solution came as a surprise.

However, negotiations had actually been taken place under a veil of secrecy for weeks—given that this solution is extremely radical they had to be secret, explained Icelandic Finance Minister Steingrímur J. Sigfússon.  01-Apr-10.

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=360231

After the one-sided Icesave-vote last weekend not much has happened officially. The Icelandic government has stressed that the dispute must be put to a rest as soon as possible. The opposition leaders have said that unless an acceptable accord is reached they will not go along with an agreement. This has lead to declarations by Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir that the government might try to finish the negotiations alone. This declaration has a hollow ring, considering that the government has in fact been sent back twice because of widespread opposition. . .

So the question is. How can this be ended? Both the British and the Dutch government know that payment will take years as Alistair Darling said in an interview on Sunday. The burden of the payment will be carried by the now defunct Landsbanki, which should rightfully pay anyway. The dispute turns around a government guarantee for the full amount with interest.  12-mar-10.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=40764&ew_0_a_id=359216

Christian II, King of Denmark and Iceland, tried to sell Iceland to King Henry VIII and the Dutch cities in 1509. . .

. . .I don’t understand the attempts of the British and Dutch governments to force the Icelandic public to pay debts which we did not create at all.

Most of the funds accumulated by the Icesave accounts by the crazy bankers at Landsbanki were used to fuel businesses and acquisitions in the UK and the Netherlands. The bank paid taxes in these two countries.

Lansbanki bank should also have been monitored properly by the authorities in these countries when it offered higher interest rates than all other banks.

I’ve always argued that the remaining assets of the crashed Landsbanki should be used to pay the Icesave account holders as far as they can cover the amounts. That would simply be fair. It has been claimed by our government that these assets will cover up to 90 percent of the Icesave debt. 04-Mar-10.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_life/?cat_id=16567&ew_0_a_id=358827

Arnold Schilder, former head of the inner supervision of the Dutch Central Bank said the Icelandic Central Bank had lied about the situation of Landsbanki’s Icesave savings scheme up until the banking collapse of October 2008 during a parliamentary inquest into the global credit crisis in the Netherlands yesterday.

“I have to say that our Icelandic colleagues were not telling us the truth. We often asked them straight out how it was going and they always answered with Hallelujah stories, that nothing was wrong. Not even in August and September 2008,” Schilder told the parliamentary committee, RÚV reports.

Schilder said Nout Wellink, the president of the Central Bank of the Netherlands, had also received similar answers.

Wellink was also called before the parliamentary committee yesterday to discuss other aspects of the crisis. On Thursday he will answer the committee’s questions about Icesave. That day, Dutch Minister of Finance Wouter Bos will also be called before the committee.  02-Feb-10.

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=357279

During the bankruptcy proceedings of Samson, a holding company that was owned by tycoon father and son Björgólfur Gudmundsson and Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, through which they held their majority share in Landsbanki, it has turned out that the company’s book-keeping was full of glitches.

Loan agreements are lacking in the case of many high transactions, including to four offshore companies in Tortola, worth ISK 800 million (USD 6.4 million, EUR 4.4 million) in total, Stöd 2 reports.  13-Jan-10.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=21123&ew_0_a_id=356500

President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson did not sign the Icesave-bill into law at a meeting with the cabinet yesterday. This was highly unusual, since usually the President would use the occasion to sign all laws ratified by Althingi, Iceland’s Parliament. . .

Many take this as an indication that the President will refuse to sign. He is in a very difficult spot. When he signed a previous bill on Icesave, passed by Althingi in late August 2009 he indicated that the reason was that many preconditions had been set in that bill. Those conditions have been watered out on the insistence of the British and Dutch governments. . .

Two days ago about 35 thousand people have signed a petition urging the President not to sign the bill. At the time of writing in the afternoon of January 1 the number has gone up to almost 55 thousand. 01-Jan-10.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=21123&ew_0_a_id=355959

The prosecutor of economic crimes has filed a charge against Haukur Thór Haraldsson, former managing director of Landsbanki’s operations division, for defrauding more than ISK 118 million (USD 965,000, EUR 640,000).

This is the first criminal case in relation to the banking collapse of October 2008 which has led to a charge being filed, Fréttabladid reports.

On October 8 last year, two days after the emergency law was passed in Iceland’s parliament, Haraldsson transferred ISK 118 million to his personal account from a domestic foreign currency account on behalf of Landsbanki’s subsidiary, which was registered in the tax haven of Guernsey. The following day the money was transferred to a different account in Haraldsson’s ownership. 

This case has been investigated for the past year and Haraldsson has always denied having been in breach of the law. He claims that he was attempting to save the bank’s money with the transfers because it wasn’t clear whether the Icelandic state would guarantee the bank’s deposits in offshore accounts.  04-Dec-09.

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16539&ew_0_a_id=354785

According to a new book on the banking collapse in Iceland by former editor of Morgunbladid Styrmir Gunnarsson, Umsátrid – fall Íslands og endurreisn, the British Financial Supervisory Authority had threatened to stop Landsbanki’s operations in the UK in August 2008 if the Icesave deposits weren’t transferred into a British subsidiary.

In an effort to keep their operations in the UK going, Landsbanki’s executives requested a loan from the Central Bank of Iceland of GBP 2.5 billion (USD 4.2 billion, EUR 2.8 billion) . . .

Former Minister of Business Affairs Björgvin G. Sigurdsson has confirmed Gunnarsson’s story. He said he had discussed the matter with his British counterpart in early September and at that time a solution seemed to be in sight. 18-Nov-09.

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=21123&ew_0_a_id=352154

Icelandic, British and Dutch authorities have reached a conclusion in their negotiations on Icesave, presented by Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir and Finance Minister Steingrímur J. Sigfússon at a press conference at parliament yesterday.

The new agreement will be signed today, Morgunbladid reports. . .

However, representatives of the opposition parties have declared that they find the conclusion of the Icesave dispute unacceptable, arguing that the preconditions Althingi had introduced are being annulled. They intend to vote against it.    19-Oct-09.

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=349903