Sigurjon ‘no’ – Vigdis ‘yes’
It created quite a stir yesterday when news came out that Sigurjon Arnason ex-CEO of Landsbanki is saying ‘no’ in the Icesave referendum today. On the other hand, ex-president Vigdis Finnbogadottir sent out a statement yesterday that she had already voted and had voted ‘yes.’
President Vigdis points out that an agreement is always preferable to going to the courts. Her decision is based on her firm belief that saying ‘yes’ is good for young Icelanders and the country as a whole. Since her statement, Vigdis has been under severe and vicious attack by the ‘no’ side.
In an interview with DV (in Icelandic), Arnason says: “For the first, in my opinion there was no guarantee (for Icesave) and secondly, if there had been a guarantee it would have broken laws on competition and thirdly, there is less risk by saying no rather than yes, in spite of threats and such.”
As journalist Egill Helgason points out on his blog (in Icelandic), all the Icesave ads stated exactly the opposite – so was the board and management of Landsbanki lying in their ads and presentations of Icesave? If this is the case, Helgason compares Icesave to common Nigeria tricks.
But as far as I can see, Arnason’s opinion now is in contrast to what he and the Landsbanki board believed to be the case when Icesave was set up. Last September, I reported (in Icelandic) that minutes from the board of Landsbanki, on Icesave, show that Landsbanki counted on Icesave being backed by a state guarantee. According to the minutes, the board thought that the Icelandic state guaranteed the EU minimum deposit guarantee of €20.887. The only thing worrying the board at the time was depositor being unsure on this issue, i.e. that depositor should be made clearly aware of the state guarantee.
Knowing about and counting on the state guarantee, the board didn’t have the slightest worries that by opening Icesave UK as a branch, they were offloading all risk on the Icelandic state. Branch/EU pasport regulation was preferred to a subsidiary that the UK would have guaranteed. A branch made it easier to upstream the money to Iceland and lend it, as the SIC report shows, to the bank’s largest shareholders, Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson and Thor Bjorgolfsson, and the usual suspects on the Icelandic business scene.
With these conflicting announcement by Arnason and Landsbanki, shouldn’t the Serious Fraud Office be looking at Landsbanki as well as Kaupthing?
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Landsbanki has always seemed to be hidden behind a smoke screen, and that still seems to be the way it prefers it.
It’s not at all outrageous to believe that lies might have been told there too, since so many of our other suspected liars have had close dealings with that bank.
wardropper
9 Apr 11 at 10:49 pm