Sigrún Davíðsdóttir's Icelog

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used various ways to influence political leaders and decision makers all over the world. Parts of the Soviet power structure, most notably of the KGB, live on in Russia. Three angles are of interest: 1) Vladimir Putin’s Russia has for years sought to influence the West via Nord Stream. 2) Admiration of Putin as the strong man thrives on the far Right in Europe and elsewhere. 3) The evolving saga of US president Donald Trump’s Russian ties might show a new side of Russian influence if it turns out that the Trump empire did receive Russian funds in its hour of need. – In addition, the Magnitsky Act proves to be an intriguing prism on Russian influence in the West.

Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2

The planning of a Russian gas pipeline from Russia to Europe started in the 1990s. It happened in an atmosphere of uncertainty following the collapse of the Soviet Union as to how the Russian relationship with the democratic West could or would develop. Some even thought Russia could join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Nato.

From the beginning, Nord Stream was developed within and closely related to Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas company founded in 1989 and a key factor in the Russian power structure. The first concrete step towards the pipeline was taken in 1997 but in 2005, the year the construction started, Nord Stream AG was incorporated in Zug, Switzerland. Gazprom has had various partners over the years but it still holds 51% of the shares.

In the countries affected by Nord Stream – Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany – the effect of the pipeline in terms of environmental effect, national security, energy security and political influence has been a hotly debated topic all these years.

The pipeline was ceremoniously inaugurated in 2011 by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon. Nord Stream 2 is now being planned.

Nordstream has always been about “Russia’s pipeline power” as Edoardo Saravelle at the Center for a New American Security wrote recently: Russia’s attempt to influence the US reaches far beyond attempting to influence the US presidential elections. “The pipeline is a naked Russian attempt to divide and conquer Europe. What makes the Kremlin so clever, and this effort so insidious, is that Gazprom has engineered an attractive business case for the project for a number of European gas importers,” writes Saravelle.

Due to the geo-political dimension of Nord Stream not only politicians and voters in the affected countries were interested in the Nord Stream development but also US politicians.

The Nord Stream effect

As German Chancellor 1998 to 2005, the social democratic leader Gerhard Schröder showed to begin with little liking for Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. That changed when Vladimir Putin, fluent in German after living there as a KGB agent, rose to power. One sign of Schröder’s strong ties to Russia was his enthusiasm for the Baltic gas pipeline and Nord Stream. One of Schröder’s last acts in office was to agree to a state guarantee of €1bn for part of the Nord Stream construction cost.

Only weeks after stepping down as Chancellor, Schröder accepted the Nord Stream offer to become head of the shareholder group of Nord Stream AG, a post he still holds. Not only Germans were shocked. Washington Post wrote an editorial on what the paper called Schröder’s “Sellout” – Democrat Congressman Tom Lantos, a holocaust survivor who died in 2008, chair of the House of Representatives foreign relations committee said that Schröder’s close ties to the Russian energy sector was “political prostitution.”

Equally, it shocked many Fins in 2008 when their social democratic Prime Minister 1995 to 2003 Paavo Lipponen became a Nord Stream consultant. A year later, Poland blocked Lipponen from being put forward as EU foreign policy chief because of his work for Nord Stream.

The new US sanctions against Russia enjoy a large bipartisan support in spite of Trump’s opposition. The new sanctions threaten to hit European companies working on the Nord Stream 2 joint venture with Russia, a major headache for the EU.

The far Right admiration for Putin

As social democrats and in spite of their ties to Putin’s Russia, both Schröder and Lipponen have been advocates of a strong and united Europe Union. But over the last decade or so, many far Right politicians in Europe and the US have shown great sympathy and even admiration for Putin.

Wholly ignoring the dismal state of the Russian economy under Putin and no matter his decidedly undemocratic and despotic tendencies many on the far Right seem to admire him as a strong leader. They have swallowed Putin’s own portrayal of himself, utterly ignoring that Putin’s iconography is unattached to reality.

The French leader of Front National Marine Le Pen and UKIP’s Nigel Farage are part of the Putin fan club. As is Republican congressman of California, Dana Rohrabacher who met with Putin in the 1990s and is known as one of Putin’s staunchest allies on Capital Hill, according to a May 2017 New York Times article.

This may well be a question of values but it can also be interpreted as flirting with an autocratic rule, characterised by “Constraints on the press, centralisation of power and various elements of nationalism” combined “with a backlash against progressive ideals and globalisation” as Olga Oliker expressed it in an article for International Institute for Strategic Studies, IISS.

Trump: more than a political admirer of Putin?

Donald Trump has shown the same admiration for Putin and autocratic rule as many on the far Right though Trump can in many ways not entirely be defined as a far Right; his vision is too rambling to show a single direction.

During his electoral campaign Donald Trump certainly flirted with ideas of autocratic rule: the idea that the president could do this and that unhampered by the House and the Senate, his many utterances against the media, his nationalistic stance and emphasis on US first, his disdain of international agreement and free trade.

Same tendencies can be found in his words and actions, or attempts to action, as president. And he does not hold back in his admiration for Putin as a person and a leader.

Last year, Republican Congressman and the House majority leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape saying: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” McCarthy now says this was only a poor joke. However, indications of a much more direct Russian Trump connection than only an ideological dallying with anti-democratic ideas have now led to the investigation led by Richard Mueller.

Make Russia great again

Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper recently said that Trump’s actions were “making Russia great again.” – There is a certain irony that a US President who got voted on the slogan Make America Great Again is now being investigated for Russian ties – and one does not need Cold War glasses to understand the severity of the allegations.

But in many ways, Trump is only the icing on a Russian pie, rich of intriguing Russian ties to Washington DC. There is Rohrabacher, as mentioned earlier. Unconnected to Trump and not under investigation as far as is known, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has a particular interesting history of Russian relations. Ross led a group of investors recapitalising Bank of Cyprus in 2014, a year after a financial crisis shook the island, a safe haven for Russian money. Ross ousted some Russians from the board, leading to speculations he was not at all a friend of Russia.

However, Viktor Vekselberg, seen as central part of Putin’s financial empire, is now the largest single shareholder in Bank of Cyprus with a representative on the board. Ross appointed Joseph Ackerman, CEO of Deutsche Bank 2002 to 2012, as a chairman of the board of Bank of Cyprus. Deutsche Bank was so active in Russia in the 1990s that one source told me the bank should have been called Russische Bank. In January 2017 Deutsche was fined $630m for having laundered $10bn on behalf of Russians.

As sources indicate that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met Russian officials during the Trump campaign in spite of his earlier categorical denials Sessions is now under renewed pressure to testify again. Then there are the contacts Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner and Trump’s son Donald Junior had with Russians. Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn lost their jobs due to Russian ties. (See here a Washington Post overview over Team Trump and its Russian connections.)

Burt and his network

Richard Burt, a former journalist, US Ambassador in Federal Republic of Germany 1985 to 1989 during the Reagan administration and a known lobbyist for Russian interests, is one of those who have suddenly been swept into the limelight because of the investigation into Trump’s Russian connections.

Burt has confirmed that he was present at two dinners hosted by Jeff Sessions during the 2016 campaign. Sessions had explicitly denied having met any lobbyists working on behalf of the Russians. Burt said to the Guardian that Sessions possibly did not know of his activities though they are widely known in Washington.

It now seems certain that Sessions met Sergey Kislyak, who until recently was the Russian Ambassador to the US, at an event in April 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel, hosted by the magazine The National Interest in Washington. At this event Trump delivered his first major speech on foreign affairs. Burt was an adviser on that speech but has said little from his notes was taken up in the speech.

An article in April this year in The National Interest, published by the think tank Center for the National Interest where Burt is on the board, gives an idea of Burt’s view on Russia. In “A Grand Strategy for Trump” Burt advocates that a US military build-up could incentivise Russia “to seek a more productive relationship with the West.” Other steps would be “finding a settlement in Ukraine, examining ways to cooperate in fighting ISIS, and addressing a new agenda of military threats and non-proliferation.”

The problem, according to Burt, is the “current Russiagate mania” “a partisan and increasingly hysterical debate in Washington over what, if anything, the Trump campaign did to assist Russian hackers in intervening in the 2016 elections.” Quoting Henry Kissinger that “demonizing Putin is not a strategy” Burt then asks: “if the United States gave up, at least for now, its twenty-five-year-old policy of turning Russia into a Western-style democracy, but instead focused on the external threats it poses, would a more politically secure Kremlin be prepared to respond positively?”

Burt is a managing director at McLarty Associates, previously part of Kissinger McLarty Associates. In his role at McLarty he has been a lobbyist for Nord Stream II. In addition he is on the board of Deutsche Bank closed-end funds. He has also been an adviser for Alfa Capital Partners, the investment arm of Alfa Bank, operating in Russia, the Netherlands, UK, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The Group’s largest investor, holding 32.8%, is Mikhail Fridman, the Ukrainian oligarch who over the years has managed to distance himself from Russia and Kremlin with his wealth intact in spite of some skirmishes: Fridman was forced to sell his stake in the oil company TNK-BP, the Russian joint venture with the BP, to the Kremlin controlled Rosneft but he apparently got a full price in cash at the top of the cycle, according to a Forbes in November 2016, written when Alfa had become part of … yes, the Trump story.

Incidentally, Gerhard Schröder sat for a while on the board of the TNK-BP. And Deutsche Bank has over the years been the largest lender to the Trump empire.

The Magnitsky prism: what does it mean talking about adoption?

“It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption… We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he (Putin) ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting.” – This is how Trump described his tête-à-tête with Putin at the G20 dinner in July in a New York Times interview.

Talking about adoption sounds very innocent – except the context is less so: Putin put an end to Americans adopting Russian children in retaliation to the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, passed in the US in 2012. Only now is a similar act finding its way into UK law in the Criminal Finance Bill. Similar law is being passed in Canada, Estonia has already its Magnitsky Act and it has been discussed in the EU.

The hedge fund manager Bill Browder hired Magnitsky as his lawyer but after exposing $230m tax fraud enriching Putin and his cohort, Magnitsky was imprisoned in Moscow in autumn 2008 and died from torture in prison a year later. Browder’s book “Red Notice” (2015) is a horrifying exposé of the whole fraud saga leading to Magnitsky’s death.

As Browder explained in a recent interview, Kremlin pays the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others millions to lobby against the Magnitsky Act. In addition to being Browder’s nemesis in fighting the Magnitsky Act she has represented Russians, with ties to Kremlin, who had their assets frozen by the US Department of Justice frozen due to the Act.

In general, corrupt politicians and officials need to get their funds abroad in order to be able to make use of these funds to pay bribes, invest etc. An essential part of corruption is of course that it is hidden and those who operate by corrupt means operate through others. With funds abroad they can promise the helpers impunity and payment abroad.

Putin, often estimated to be the richest man in the world, is no exception: if the flow of funds abroad is hindered his power is seriously diminished. The Magnitsky Act hits this flow and has exposed Putin’s Achilles heal.

Trump’s interest in adoption relates directly to the campaign against the Magnitsky Act, exposes the Russian enablers and the extensive Russian attempts to influence US politics, ultimately a serious threat to the security of the West and rule of law and democracy.

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In spite of earlier promises to the Eurogroup the Greek government continues to persecute former head of ELSTAT Andreas Georgiou and two of his former senior staff. As long as the never-ending prosecutions continue the Greek government cannot claim it is seriously committed to turn the country around. By continuing these persecutions the Greek government is clinging to the story that the fraudulent statistics from around 2000 to 2009 are the correct ones, thereby in effect presenting the 2010 revisions as criminal misreporting. Thus, the Eurogroup and other international partners should refuse to cooperate with the Greek government as long as these trials continue.

In spite of earlier acquittals time and again, Greek authorities keep finding new ways to prosecute the former head of ELSTAT. The latest development happened last week, July 18 and 19. As at the trial in May, there was a shouting and insulting mob of around thirty people present in court at the trial on July 18 when Georgiou was being tried for alleged violation of duty. The mob was clearly cheering on the accusation witnesses in a disturbing way; again, something that would be unthinkable in any civilised country.

On July 19, the Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court proposed yet again to annul the acquittal of Georgiou and two senior ELSTAT staff for allegedly intentionally inflating the 2009 government deficit and causing Greece a damage of €171bn.

Mob trial

After being unanimously found innocent of charges of violation of duty in December last year by a panel of three judges, as the trial prosecutor had recommended, this acquittal was annulled by another prosecutor. This is how this farce and mockery of justice has been kept going: acquittals are annulled and on goes the persecution.

This trial will now continue on 31 July when judgement is also expected – and it can be fully expected that Georgiou will be found guilty.

This report from Pastras Times gives an idea of the atmosphere at the trial: The professor [Z. Georganda] argued that from the data she has at her disposal, she considers that the 2009 government deficit was around 4 to 5% [of GDP] – a statement, which ignited the reaction of the audience that began applauding and shouting: “Traitors” “Hang them on Syntagma square”… The witness continued her point arguing that Greece had one of the lowest deficits “but we could and we were paying our debts because there was economic activity. Georgiou led the country to prolonged recession.” Ms. Georganda said characteristically, causing the audience to explode anew.

A pattern over six years: acquittals followed by repeated prosecution

As everyone who knows the story of the discoveries made in 2009 and 2010 of the Greek state statistics Georganda’s arguments are a total travesty of the facts, a story earlier recounted on Icelog (here the long story of the fraudulent stats and the revisions in 2010; here some blogs on the course of this horrendous saga).

July 19 was the deadline for the Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Xeni Demetriou to make a proposal for annulment of the decision of the Appeals Court Council to acquit Georgiou and two former senior ELSTAT staff of the charge of making false statements about the 2009 government deficit and causing Greece a damage of €171bn. Demitrou opted to propose to annul the acquittal decision.

The Criminal Section of the Supreme Court will now consider her proposal for the annulment of the acquittal. If the latter agrees with the proposal of the Chief Prosecutor of Greece, the case will be re-examined by the Appeals Court Council. If the Appeals Court Council, under a new composition, then decides to not acquit Georgiou and his colleagues, the three will be subjected to full a trial by the Appeals Court. If convicted they face a sentence of up to life in prison.

This would then be yet another round of the same case: in September 2015, the same Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, then a Deputy Prosecutor, proposed the annulment of the then existing acquittal decision of the Appeals Court Council. In August 2016, the Criminal Section of the Supreme Court agreed to this proposal, which is why the Appeals Court Council re-considered the case.

And so it goes in circles, seemingly until the legal process gets to the “right result” – trial and conviction.

Can the three ELSTAT staff get a fair trial?

Given the fact that the same case goes in circles – with one part of the system agreeing to acquittals, which then are thrown out, in the same case – it can only be concluded that Andreas Georgiou and his two ELSTAT colleagues are indeed being persecuted for fulfilling the standard of EU law, as of course required by Eurostat and other international organisations.

As this saga has been on-going for six years it seems that the three simply cannot get a fair hearing in Greece. This raises serious questions about the rule of law in Greece and the state of human rights there.

At the same time the last chapter in this six-year saga took place now in July, €7.7bn of EU taxpayer funds, a tranche of EU and IMF funds for Greece, was paid out. This, inter alia on the basis of the statistics revised in 2010, for which the Greek state keeps prosecuting the ELSTAT statisticians thereby de facto claiming these statistics were the product of criminal misreporting.

Tsakalotos breaks his promise

As reported earlier on Icelog the Eurogroup has clearly noticed the ELSTAT case: at the Eurogroup meeting of 22 May ECB governor Mario Draghi raised the matter, saying that as agreed earlier, priority should be given to implementing “actions on ELSTAT that have been agreed in the context of the programme. Current and former ELSTAT presidents should be indemnified against all costs arising from legal actions against them and their staff.”

Greek minister of finance Euclid Tsakalotos announced that “On ELSTAT, we are happy for this to become a key deliverable before July.”

In an apparent attempt to appease the Eurogroup, it was announced this week that ELSTAT will pay legal costs for the former ELSTAT employees facing trial. However, the legal provision proposed by the government is wholly inadequate and may actually do more harm than good to Georgiou and his colleagues.

For example, it says that these official statisticians will have to return any funds they get if they are convicted. This is legislating perverse incentives. It is like saying: Convict them otherwise we will have to pay them.

The proposed legislation also puts a very low limit on the amounts that would be covered. In addition, it would not cover costs of legal counsel, costs of interpretation of foreign witnesses, nor would it cover the cost of travel and accommodation of these witnesses when they come to Greece abroad to be defence witnesses for Georgiou. There also seems to be a labyrinthine process for accessing the funds making it unlikely the accused will ever see any reimbursement of cost.

It is thus quite clear from events this week that not only has Tsakalotos broken the promise he gave to Draghi and the Eurogroup in May – he clearly has no intention of keeping it. The question is how long the Eurogroup will tolerate broken promises and the fact that by prosecuting the ELSTAT staff the Greek government does indeed keep portraying the revised statistics as criminal misreporting.

 
According the Kathimerini‘s cartoonist, the ELSTAT saga is a simple one: New Democracy PM 2004 to 2009 Kostas Karamanlis is unwilling to let go of the persecution – “You thought you would get away? Where do you think you are going, eh Georgiou?”

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The Russian Icelandic connections keep stimulating the fantasy. In a recent Bloomberg article Timothy L. O’Brien calls on special counsel Robert Mueller to “check out Iceland.” The facts are indeed elusive but Mueller and his team should be in an ace position to discover whatever there is to discover, via FL Group. If there is no story untold re Russia and Iceland, the unwillingness of the British government to challenge Russian interests is another intriguing Russia-related topic to explore.

“Iceland, Russia and Bayrock – some facts, less fiction” was my recent contribution to the fast growing compendium of articles on potential or alleged connections between nefarious Russian forces and Iceland. The recent Bloomberg article by Timothy L. O’Brien adds nothing new to the topic in terms of tangible facts.

The Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was one of those who early on aired the potential connection. Already in 2009, in a Sky interview that O’Brien mentions, Berezovsky made sweeping comments but gave no concrete evidence, as can be heard here in the seven minutes long interview.

What however Berezovsky says regarding London, the dirty money pouring into London is correct. That flow has been going on for a long time and will no doubt continue: it doesn’t seem to matter who is in power in Britain, the door to Russian money and dirty inflow in general is always open, serviced by the big banks and the enablers, such as accountants and lawyers, operating in London.

What Berezovsky really said

Asked how Putin and the oligarchs operated, Berezovsky said they bought assets all over the world but also took on a lot of debt. “They took a lot of credit from the banks and so they were not able to pay that back. And the best example is definitely Iceland. And you remember when lets say three months ago Russian government declared that they would help Iceland. And Russia is so strong that they’re able to help even a member of Nato. And their trick is very simple because Russian let’s say top level bureaucrats like Putin, like others and oligarchs together they created system how to operate on the West. How to use this fantastic money to buy assets and so and so. They found this very clever solution. They took a country and bought the country, which is member of Nato, which is not a member of EU. It means that regulation is different. They put a lot of money, dirty money in general, yeah.”

When asked further if Russians were buying high-end property in London with dirty money Berezovsky said this was indeed the case, all done to gain power: “The example which I gave you. As far as Iceland is concerned just confirmed realistically that Putin and his cronies made absolutely dirty money and tried to invest their money all over the world including Britain.”

This is very much Berezovsky but hardly a clear exposé. Exactly what the connection was, through the banks or the country as a whole isn’t clear. Sadly, Berezovsky died in 2013, under what some see as mysterious circumstances, others consider it a suicide. Incidentally, Berezovsky’s death is one of fourteen deaths in the UK involving Russians, enablers to Russian oligarchs or others with some Russian ties, recently investigated in four articles by Buzzfeed.

The funding of the Icelandic banks – yet again

In his Bloomberg article O’Brien visits the topic of the funding of the Icelandic banks. As I mentioned in my previous Russia blog, the rumours regarding the Russian Icelandic connections and the funding of the Icelandic banks were put to rest with the report of the Special Investigative Commission, SIC. The report analysed the funding the banks sought on international markets, from big banks that then turned into creditors when the banks failed.

O’Brien’s quotes Eva Joly the French investigative judge, now an MEP, who advised Icelandic authorities when they were taking the first steps towards investigating the operations of the then failed banks. Joly says that the Russian question should be asked. “There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn’t entirely explained by central bank lending,” Joly is quoted as saying, adding “Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that.”

I’m not sure where the misunderstanding crept in but of course the Icelandic central bank was not funding the Icelandic banks. As the SIC report clearly showed, the Icelandic banks, as most other banks, sought and found easy funding by issuing bonds abroad at the time when markets were flooded by cheap money. Prosecutor Ólafur Hauksson, who has been in charge of the nine-year banking investigations in Iceland, says to O’Brien that he and his team have not seen any evidence of money laundering but adds that the Icelandic investigations have not focused on international money flows via the banks.

As I pointed out in my earlier Russia blog, the Jody Kriss evidence, from court documents in his proceedings against Bayrock, the company connected to president Donald Trump, is again inconclusive. Something that Kriss himself points out; Kriss is quoting rumours and has nothing more to add to them.

Why and how would money have been laundered through Icelandic banks?

The main purpose of money laundering is to provide illicit money with licit origin. Money laundering in big banks like HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Wachovia is well documented and in general, patterns of money laundering are well established. The Russian Icelandic story will not be any better by repeating the scanty indications. We could turn the story around and ask: if the banks were really used by Russians or any other organized crime how would they have done it?

One pattern is so-called back-to-back loans, i.e. illicit money is deposited in a bank (which then ignores “know your customer” regulation) but taken out as a loan issued by that bank. That gives these funds a legitimate origin; they are now a loan. As far as I understand, there are no sign of this pattern in any of the Icelandic banks.

When Wachovia laundered money for Mexican drug lords cash was deposited with forex exchanges, doing business with Wachovia. The bank brought the funds to Wachovia branches in the US, either via wire transfers, travellers’ cheques or as part of the bank’s cash-moving operations. When the funds were then made available to the drug lords again in Mexico, it seemed as if the money was coming from the US, enough to give the illegitimate funds a legitimate sheen. Nothing like these operations was part of what the Icelandic banks were doing.

Money laundering outside the banks?

There might of course have been other ways of laundering money but again the question is from where to where. As I mentioned in my Russia blog, FL Group, the company connected to the Bayrock story, was short-lived but attracted and lost a spectacular amount of money. As did other Icelandic companies, which have since failed: there could be potential patterns of money laundering there though again there are no Russians in sight (except for Bayrock) – or simply examples of disastrously bad management.

Russians, or anyone else, certainly would not need Icelandic banks to move funds for example into the UK – the big banks were willing to and able to do it, as can be seen from the oligarchs and others with shady funds buying property in London. It was eye-opening to join one of the London tours organised by Kleptocracy Tours and see the various spectacular properties owned by Russian oligarchs here in London.

The Magnitsky Act was introduced in the US in 2012 but is only finding its way into UK law this year in the Criminal Finances Bill, meant to enable asset freezing and denying visa to foreign officials known to be corrupt and having violated human rights.

The Icelandic banks – the most investigated banks

There were indeed real connections to Russians in the Icelandic banks as I listed in my previous Russia blog. In addition, Kaupthing financed the super yacht Serene for Yuri Shefler with a loan of €79.5m according to a leaked overview of Kauthing lending, from September 2008. These customers were among Kaupthing non-Russian high-flying London customers, mostly clients in Kaupthing Luxembourg, such as Alshair Fiyaz, Simon Halabi, Mike Ashley and Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz.

None of the tangible evidence corroborates the story of the Icelandic banks being some gigantic Russian money laundering machine. That said, I have heard from investigators who claim they are about to unearth more material.

In the meantime we should not forget that Iceland has diligently been prosecuting bankers for financial assistance, breach of fiduciary duty and market manipulation – almost thirty bankers and others close to the banks have been sentenced to prison. Now that 2008 investigations are drawing to a close in Iceland, four Barclays bankers are facing charges in London, the first SFO case related to events in 2008, in a case very similar to one of the Icelandic cases, as I have pointed out earlier.

Exactly because the Icelandic banks have been so thoroughly investigated and so much is known about them, their clients etc., it is difficult to imagine there are humongous stories there waiting to be told. But perhaps Robert Mueller and his team will surprise us.

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