Finally.
Icelandic media has been hunting with live ammo over the past few days.1 They have exposed two secret payments from Landsbanki (responsible for the Icesave debacle) and FL Group (the group of investors behind the collapsed Glitnir bank) to the Independence Party in 2006.2
The Independence Party has been in power in Iceland for the most of the last 18 years and are responsible for the policies and decisions that led to the collapse of the Icelandic economy. They were responsible for the deregulation that made those donors billionaires, the privatisations that made those donors billionaires and a host of regulatory decisions that continued to make those donors billions.
The payments were made in secret, just days before the law was changed prohibiting payments of exactly this kind.
Just these two payments together are greater than the entirety of all donations received by the competing Coalition Party (our social democrats) that year and are at least a hundred times larger than the biggest donation received by the Left-Green party.
It’s hard to see how the Independence Party can spin their way out of this one, with only two weeks to the election.
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Icelandic news media has been doing a fantastic job after the collapse, with a zeal and ruthlessness that I have never seen before, certainly not in any English-language news media. They’ve been defying banking secrecy laws, openly defying archaic regulations and traditions, ignoring numerous death threats, and taken risks that could make themselves liable to years of jail time. ↩
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These two investment groups pretty much cover most of the people responsible for the collapse. The only investment group missing is that of Kaupthing Bank and I’m willing to bet, at this point, that a donation of a similar size from them will be revealed sometime over the next few days. These three groups were often dubbed “the Icelandic investment vikings” during the years of the bubble and ownership of almost anything in Icelandic ownership, certainly any company owned abroad, can be traced to these investors. ↩
